India's Unending Journey_Finding Balance in a Time of Change

by Mark Tully

  It’s that genius for absorption and adaption, and in particular that ‘shocked incomprehension’ in the face of dogmatic certainty, that I want to write about in this book. I would like to suggest that dogmatic certainty isn’t just a trait of religion and philosophy, but can be characteristic of attitudes in politics, economics and society as a whole. In my own life time, the governing school of economics in the Western world has made a 180-degree swing, from the certainty that socialism is the ultimate and absolute truth to the conviction that market capitalism is the only guarantee of prosperity. Left-wing politicians, civil servants, nationalised industry employees and trade unions once espoused a socialism that came to dominate us in the West, and government became a vast vested interest. Now big business is dominating us because we have been led to believe in market economics with absolute certainty. In Chapters 8 and 9 I will be considering the limits of economics and looking at ways in which India can help us to redefine growth.

  It’s not just our economics but also our sexual mores that have swung by 180 degrees, from one form of certainty to another. As I will explain in more detail in Chapter 2, I was educated in the fifties and so belong to the last generation brought up in the repressive Victorian tradition of sexual behaviour, taught to believe that any diversion from the strict Christian code of sexual morality was a heinous sin. Later in the twentieth century, however, we veered to the opposite extreme. Now sex has become a commodity.

  In charting the course of India’s Unending Journey, it is not my intention to offer startling religious or philosophical revelations, new directions or full-stops to old ways; there will be no green or red lights, but several ambers – perhaps not much more than warnings. All the same, attempting to observe those warnings has made a deep difference to my own thinking and, indeed, my life, and I sincerely believe them to be relevant to the Western world. As I believe that modern Western culture tends to ignore those warnings, much of this book is a discussion of religion, politics, economics, business and sexual mores in the West. Nevertheless, I believe that these warnings are also relevant to India, which is in danger of ignoring its own traditions and rushing headlong into the adoption of modern Western culture. As this book is based on my personal experiences, I will be writing about the two Western cultures I know best – the British and the Irish. I realise that when it comes to religion, the position of America is very different.

  In Britain and Ireland, the decline in the influence of Christianity has not meant that the passion of dogmatic certainty has diminished. Modernism was the secular counterpart to dogmatic Christianity. Modernism’s dogma was rationalism and rationalism’s offspring, science. Modernism regarded true knowledge as being universal and believed its validity could be proved with absolute certainty. Modernism held that we were capable of discovering truth, and established dogmas that were irrefutable. The seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes is regarded as the father of modernism. In his work The Passion of the Western Mind, the philosopher Richard Tarnas notes that Descartes was a mathematician and says, ‘By applying such [mathematically] precise and painstaking reasoning to all questions of philosophy, and by accepting as true only those ideas that presented themselves to his reason as clear, distinct, and free from internal contradiction, Descartes established his means for the attainment of absolute certainty.’

  Some might argue that the arrival of post-modernism has meant that the passion for dogmatic certainty and Descartes’ method for discovering absolute certainty have gone out of the window. Post-modernists tell us we live in a world of uncertainty, in which it is accepted that nothing final can be said, no view can go unchallenged and all dogmas are up for grabs. Yet I wonder just how deeply post-modernism has penetrated, how willing our allegedly post-modern society really is to absorb and adapt, and whether we are not actually still bound by certainties, even though they may not be the certainties of Semitic religions and Marxism that Zaehner spoke about, or even the mathematical methods of Descartes. At the very least, it seems to me that we still want to believe in absolute truths, even though, as post-modernism has suggested, those who claim to know those truths often use them to try to dominate us.

  As I see it, one of the reasons for the decline in religious observation in Europe is an aggressive secularism that is as dogmatic as any religion and which has become the dominant philosophy of life in the West. The philosopher John Gray has pointed out a strange reversal that has taken place in modern life. In his foreword to Straw Dogs, he argues:

  Today religious believers are more free thinking [than their Victorian predecessors]. Driven to the margins of a culture in which science claims authority over all of human knowledge they have to cultivate a capacity for doubt. In contrast, secular believers – held fast by the conventional wisdom of the time – are in the grip of unexamined dogmas.

  Advocates of the conventional wisdom are not just dogmatic; they are also afraid of religion. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, spoke in an interview of the ‘agenda of nervous secularists’, which he said was creating ‘hostility to religion’. The religions that the secularists fear are fundamentalist, yet ironically it is their own dogmatism that plays a major role in creating the dogmatism that they fear. The world got warning of this with the Iranian Islamic revolution against the Shah, the darling of the West. The Iranian professor Ahmed Fardid coined the term ‘West-toxication’ for the poisoning and pollution that Iranians felt was afflicting them. Fearing what they saw as extreme materialism, many Iranians naturally took refuge in an extreme form of Islam.

  In India today there is a corresponding battle between Westernised secularists and those following an extreme and dogmatic form of Hinduism, a form that is quite contrary to Hinduism’s traditional dismissive attitude towards dogmatic certainty. As a result of this battle, anyone who speaks of Hinduism is likely to be accused by secularists of being a fundamentalist. A few years ago I made a film suggesting that Mahatma Gandhi had the answer to the current shouting match. The Mahatma said, ‘My Hinduism teaches me to respect all religions.’ He was assassinated because he insisted on Muslims being respected and fairly treated. Being quintessentially Indian, he advocated a middle way between a theocratic state and one that gave the impression of having no time for religion, which is what the word ‘secular’ has come to signify in the minds of so many. He advocated a state that was avowedly proud of being multi-religious and hoped India would ‘live for this true picture in which every religion has its full and equal place’. But when I advocated that same view in my film, many of my secular friends accused me of supporting fundamentalist Hinduism. An article in one of India’s national dailies went further, claiming that I had advocated a theocratic state, which was the last thing I intended, or that Gandhi would ever have wanted. Such is the nervousness of secularists in India.

  We have become convinced that liberty is the supreme value in life, and so have lost sight of the other side of that coin: the fact that we are also social animals. The result is that the individual has become more important than society. We are forever hearing about rights, but we don’t hear much about duties. In The Dignity of Difference, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes of ‘the collapse of moral language, the disappearance of “I ought”, and its replacement by “I want”, “I choose”, “I feel”.’ We have to have something to want, something to choose, so we need perpetual change, perpetual so-called ‘progress’. However, as Jonathan Sacks goes on to say:

  Bad things happen when the pace of change exceeds our ability to change, and events move faster than our understanding. It is then that we feel the loss of control over our lives. Anxiety creates fear, fear leads to anger, anger breeds violence, and violence – when combined with weapons of mass destruction – becomes a deadly reality. The greatest single antidote to violence is conversation, speaking our fears, listening to the fears of others, and in that sharing of vulnerabilities discovering a genesis of hope.

  Those who are dogmatic and certain that they are righ
t don’t feel vulnerable and have no desire to have conversations. They only want to convince.

  Conversation is an integral part of the Indian tradition that has influenced me. Every evening, with the cows safely home and a cloud of pungent smoke from cow-dung stoves lingering over the village, men would sit on their charpoys, or string cots, and talk over local and national issues. Over the years I often joined in these discussions and was subjected to severe cross-questioning about the BBC reports they had heard on their transistor radios. Even now, in small towns every tea shop has a copy of a newspaper and customers linger long after drinking the last drop of the milky sweet liquid in their cup to discuss the news. In Delhi, when two strangers find themselves waiting for the same bus it is not long before they get into conversation. In government offices it often seems as though conversation is the only activity!

  This love of conversation has its down side. Because Indians talk to each other so much, the bush telegraph remains a very effective media for spreading rumours, and rumours can be a powerful weapon in the hands of troublemakers. When I worked for the BBC I was sometimes a victim of the bush telegraph myself. I suppose it’s a backhanded tribute to the corporation that our reputation for reliability led rumourmongers to authenticate their false information by claiming to have heard it on the BBC. For example, on the first day of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in 1975, when it was still uncertain whether all her cabinet would endorse the constitutional coup that suspended democracy, a rumour was spread that I had broadcast reports of the resignation of a senior minister and the house arrest of other members of the government. After the Emergency was over, the Information Minister at that time, Inder Gujral, told me that the rumour reached Indira Gandhi’s inner circle. Apparently, Gujral was ordered to ‘send for Mark Tully, pull down his trousers, give him a few lashes, and send him to jail’. Fortunately, he declined the task, saying it was the Home Minister’s job to imprison people, not his, and called for the monitoring reports of the BBC’s broadcasts. He found that they contained no reference to ministerial resignations and happily my backside was not bruised.

  The Indian Nobel Prize-winning economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, a former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, has demonstrated how wide, deep and relevant India’s tradition of conversation and questioning is in his collection of essays called The Argumentative Indian. In his preface he speaks of ‘India’s long argumentative history’ and explains:

  Discussions and arguments are critically important for democracy and public reasoning. They are central to the practice of secularism and for even-handed treatment of adherents of different religious faiths (including those who have no religious beliefs). Going beyond these basic structural priorities, the argumentative tradition, if used with deliberation and commitment, can also be extremely important in resisting social inequalities and in removing poverty and deprivation. Voice is a crucial component of the pursuit of social justice.

  But in the modern Western tradition voices are all too often drowned out by the din of constant conflict – conflict that is frequently engineered by the media. Whether it be in politics, economics, religion, or any other sphere of human activity, the bandying of certainties frequently passes for discussion, and shouting from opposite corners is considered the way to conduct an argument. In India, too, the media, which takes its cue from the West, seems to think its role is to promote aggression not discussion, and conflict not conversation. One regular verbal punch-up on television is a show called The Big Fight. I am forever asking my friends in Indian television why, whenever there is a national religious dispute, they put members of the extremist factions into the ring to fight over it, instead of giving viewers the opportunity to hear a reasoned debate. To make matters worse, the programme’s presenters often allow the extremists to claim that they speak for the entire Hindu or Muslim community, which all electoral results so far show to be untrue.

  I believe that the Indian tradition of argument and discussion provides a way forward between the rock of dogmatic modernism and the hard stone of post-modernism. This was confirmed for me by my conversations with Chaturvedi Badrinath. Badri, as he is always known, had the good fortune to be a senior civil servant in the Southern State of Tamil Nadu at the height of the movement that destroyed the Brahmin domination there. As Badri was a Brahmin himself, the politicians discriminated against him by not giving him any work to do. But the politicians couldn’t take away his right to an office and a stenographer, so he spent much of his career happily pursuing his personal interest in Indian philosophy, and had someone to type out his thoughts. During our many discussions on that philosophy, it was he who gave me the clue to navigating the path between modernism and post-modernism.

  Badri stressed the importance of the Sanskrit word neti. He pointed out that in the Hindu scriptures known as the Upanishads it is suggested that the Sanskrit expression neti, neti needs to be added after any definitive description. He translates neti as ‘it is not this alone.’ To me, the word implies that we should not go to extremes, that we can reach conclusions but we should not claim our definition is absolute or final; the door for discussion must remain open but there can be sufficient grounds for taking positions. Mahatma Gandhi once said, ‘I claim to have no infallible guidance or inspiration’. At the same time he insisted, ‘I want the windows of my house to be open to the winds blowing from all corners of the world, but I don’t want to be blown off my feet.’

  I come back to my friend Badri for an explanation of what I have come to believe should be the aim of all this discussion. He has written:

  The question is one of knowing the true place of everything in the scheme of human life. To value too greatly or too little a particular human attribute in its relation to the rest is to disintegrate the natural wholeness of human personality. To value the material over the spiritual, or the spiritual over the material, the transient over the eternal, or the eternal over the transient, the body over the mind, or the mind over the body, the individual over the society or the society over the individual, the self over the other or the other over the self, is to create conflicts both within ourselves and with the rest of the world.

  And so, to me, the Indian tradition has come to imply that in everything in life we should seek to be balanced, and that the quest for that balance never ends. We are like tightrope-walkers; we have to concentrate on our balance all the time.

  One of the most crucial balancing acts we have to perform is between fate and free will – between acknowledging that capabilities and opportunities are given to us and exercising our free will to make the best of them. I was simply acknowledging the workings of fate when I accepted that Puri would be the place to start this book. But I also acknowledge that it has required will-power to write it. The modern cult of individualism, and the belief that competition provides the driving force for progress – that without competition we would all sink into self-satisfied sloth – makes fate appear to be a dangerous word. Anyone who speaks of fate is almost bound to be called a fatalist, to be accused of being like the man described in M.E. Hare’s limerick:

  Said a philosopher – suddenly – “Damn

  It’s born in upon me I am

  An engine that moves

  In pre-destinate grooves

  I’m not even a bus, but a tram.”

  It is particularly dangerous to speak of fate in the context of Indian culture, which is so often accused of fatalism. But that morning in the BNR hotel in Puri is by no means the only time I have been aware of fate playing a role in my life. Indeed, fate plays a role from the very beginning of all our lives because we don’t choose our parents; we don’t even choose to be born. If we exaggerate the role of free will in our lives we become either arrogant, attributing all our achievements to our own efforts and abilities, or depressed, attributing all our apparent failures to our weakness.

  What I have learnt from India might be summed up in that old-fashioned word, ‘humility’. Acknowledging the role of fate in our
lives; accepting that our knowledge will always be limited; seeking to discuss rather than to dogmatise; appreciating that we need always to be examining ourselves if we are to maintain the desired balance – all these acts surely require humility. Humility, like fate, is a dangerous word in times when success is the prevalent religion and celebrities are its gods. Discussing India’s Unending Journey with a friend, I mentioned that, all things considered, it was probably a book about humility. She replied, ‘That will certainly be counter-cultural!’ The copy of the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church that I bought as a theology student many years ago (and still have) seems to me to describe humility in a way that should offset any fears that I am necessarily talking about a denial of self-esteem. The dictionary says that humility represses ‘inordinate ambition and self-esteem without allowing man to fall into the opposite error of exaggerated or hypocritical self-abjection’. In other words, it’s a matter of balance. It would be hypocritical of me, and lacking in humility, to say that I have got that balance right in my own life; I can only say that living in India has taught me to be aware of the need to try to get it right.

  One of the most moving acknowledgements of the value of humility I have ever read was written by Oscar Wilde, a poet and playwright who was anything but humble before he was found guilty and jailed on a charge of homosexuality. A letter written from jail to the man with whom he had had the homosexual relationship was later published under the title De Profundis (Latin for ‘from the depths’). In it, Wilde writes of humility being ‘hidden away in his nature’, but now being: