But the careerists had another kind of faith. The Muslim police officer, like the Hindu military officer at the Sikh massacre, had spoken to me of the need to preserve ‘national integrity’. There were other officials who when I asked them about the rising costs of Indian rule over Kashmir – the tens of thousands of dead, maimed, widowed and orphaned people – spoke of the need to protect Kashmir from the malevolent designs of Pakistan, a patriotic duty that sometimes required acts of violence. Sometimes they pleaded that they were only men obeying orders sent to them from above.
Most of these men had a reputation for honesty; the corrupt ones were easier to understand. They had families in distant India, worrying about their safety. Photos attesting to the domestic happiness they were cut off from often sat in wooden frames on their large tables. In their armoured jeeps, among automatic rifles, machine-guns and hand grenades, they carried tapes of melancholy Hindi film songs, the songs about love and loss they shared with the people they tortured and killed. How had they allowed themselves to destroy other human beings in the name of a nation or state? How had they come to ally themselves with such meaningless abstractions as ‘national integrity’?
Describing the modern state in his notebooks as ‘organized immorality’, Nietzsche had wondered, ‘How is it achieved that a great mass does things the individual would never consent to do?’ His answer, which he hoped to elaborate upon in a book, was unambiguous: ‘by the division of responsibility; of commanding and carrying out commands; by intercalating the virtues of obedience, of duty, of the love of prince and fatherland; upholding pride, severity, strength, hatred, revenge’.13 Still, as Simone Weil asked after the First World War, how had the state managed to ‘set itself up as an absolute value in this world, that is, as an object of idolatry?’
In the last century, these questions, new and urgent in India, had been asked many times in Europe, before as well as after six million Jews were killed in the most vicious state-sponsored crime in history. And the irony too had been noted: that the omnipotent state was born in Europe ostensibly to protect the interests of a new kind of citizen – individuals who were supposedly able to pursue their own interests and to make choices for themselves.
This idea of the individual, still new in a traditional society like India’s, had arisen relatively late even in Europe. Alexis de Tocqueville was certain that ‘our ancestors lacked the word individualism, which we have created for our own use, because in their era there were, in fact, no individuals who did not belong to a group and who could regard themselves as absolutely alone’. For centuries since the spread of Christianity, family, church or local community had limited the horizons of human beings. Their rights and duties were communally determined; most people were bound firmly to pre-existing relations of status and kinship.
What was true of much of Europe before the political and economic revolutions of the nineteenth century was true of India even as late as 1947, when middle-class nationalists claiming to represent the Indian people inherited control of a vast administrative machinery from the British. In India, where the ascetic and the renouncer had been the first individuals of any kind, there was little individualism in de Tocqueville’s sense of the word. Most people were defined through their membership in caste and community; few of them enjoyed the freedom of choice that was supposedly the essence of the modern individual.
This state of affairs was what a westernized ruling elite proposed to change after seeing off the British. Men like Nehru were offended by the passive Indian acceptance of poverty and what seemed to him to be feudal oppression sustained by the prestige of religion. Nehru believed that the poorest and most downtrodden Indians could be modernized into European-style rational individuals through mass secular education and a socialistic economic system.
He had little doubt that given sufficient time and incentive most Indians would shed their previous identities and become like Europeans: i.e. wear modern clothes, work in a factory or office, live in an urban setting, raise nuclear families, drive a car, vote in regular elections and pay taxes. The example of Europe had proved that such autonomous and secular individuals alone could form a modern democratic nation. But since few of them existed in India at the time of independence, it was the state’s responsibility to create them – to produce, in effect, its citizens.
Five decades later, the Indian state could still claim plausibly to be saving its citizens from themselves in places like Kashmir. But who was this autonomous and secular individual whom the state required for its existence – the person who lived merely for the sake of increasing and satisfying his material needs? There were hardly any precedents in India’s own intellectual and spiritual traditions. And, here, a particular version of European history became important for modernizers like Nehru – the history whose innate assumptions I grew up with and accepted without being aware of them.
This history began with the Reformation. Calvin and Luther had condemned the idleness and opulence of the church. They had held up a remote and mysterious creator God, who had already predestined men to salvation or damnation, but for whose glory men had to work and seek to create his kingdom on earth. The reformed Christian was humble, ascetic, hardworking. He was also the progenitor of free enterprise and economic individualism.
In this history, when the medieval forms of life in Europe broke up, partly under pressure from the rising bourgeoisie seeking worldly success as a sign of salvation, a new universe of personal choices opened up before human beings.14 To accept these choices was to plunge into the adventure of individuality. In the centuries that followed, there emerged accordingly a new vocabulary for human character that was defined by personal choice and desire and the capacity of self-transformation.
The European Enlightenment was another step towards what Kant had called ‘man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity’. Philosophers like Hume, Locke and Adam Smith assumed that man had a natural right to independent existence, to the fulfilment of personal desires, to the pursuit of things, or to activity for its own sake. For them the problem was to explain how such separate individuals could live together; how the autonomous self related to other autonomous selves in the pursuit of its interests.
The new world view presumed that man was motivated by self-interest, or, in so far as he cared about others, by enlightened self-interest. Modern government had emerged in order to convert individual interests into a system of rights and duties, and to prescribe laws, which would apply equally to all individuals. It was a single, sovereign power, because by concentrating all authority in itself, it could quicken the escape of the individual from his various allegiances to family, guild, church and local community. At the same time, it had weakened itself enough in western Europe and America to allow the individual the full enjoyment of his individuality. By constraining itself through democratic procedures, the making of law through consultation between ruler and the ruled, it had guaranteed him his freedom.
There seemed something very grand about the concept of freedom, about the individual’s liberation from the constraints of traditional society, and his freely chosen right to movement, occupation, speech, religious belief and property. It was why an Indian of my background could not easily challenge the idea that the modern nation state, absolute and impersonal, could be the liberator of the new individual from his old chains.
Indeed, to look at the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe was mainly to admire intellectuals like Hume, Voltaire, Diderot and Marx who had upheld the potential of the human being to master circumstances instead of being a slave to them. The fate of the world seemed to have been happily settled somewhere in the assertions of the two major figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume and Adam Smith.
But there was a special irony here for those Indians who were enamoured of the new secular assessment of human possibility arrived at in distant Europe, and hoped to realize it to the full in postcolonial India. For India had already suffered some of the les
s anticipated consequences of the endless striving for growth. The moral climate in which the multiplication of human needs was seen as good, private happiness was posited as the highest aim, and activity for its own sake turned into a principle, was also one that had legitimized the conquest and subjugation of strange peoples around the world.
It wasn’t clear to most of us who revered the great thinkers of Europe that many of them had anticipated and outlined the type of politics, economics and philosophy that the all-conquering bourgeoisie needed to extend its power over the earth. Nor did we know much about the complex doubts these men had revealed about the character and motives of the free and ambitious individual even as they celebrated his emergence.
Marx had ideological reasons to fear what the endlessly renewed needs of the individual might lead to. He thought that ‘modern bourgeois society, a society that has conjured up such mighty means of production and exchange, is like the sorcerer who can no longer control the powers of the underworld that he has called up by his spells’.
But even Adam Smith, the proponent of free trade, had wondered early in his life if power and wealth, ‘those great objects of human desire’, can make one immune to ‘anxiety, fear, sorrow, diseases, danger and death’. He had considered the idea that happiness could be secured through desiring more things than one needs a deception and had eventually concluded that it is ‘well that nature imposes on us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.’ After all,
it is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence, and the great high road of communication to the different nations of the earth.15
Smith believed that any society which restricted its needs would endanger its poorest members. He asserted that free trade would conquer scarcity and create abundance and leisure wherever it was allowed. He envisaged a system of natural liberty in which individuals were free to create and compete for wealth.
Smith’s influential vision of human growth and competition, which had been transformed into the ideology of imperial conquest, and which still drives much of international politics, had not gone uncontested in Europe. Its greatest critic was Rousseau, whom I knew only as the intellectual father of the totalitarian state. He had despaired of the lack of virtue in a society built upon the unfettered pursuit of desire. For him the state was necessary precisely to regulate this emerging society of commerce and money, of envy and inequality, in which he thought individuals would be hostile strangers to each other.
As he saw it, mankind might have lived once in a state of simplicity and equality, but the discovery of agriculture and metals had trapped men into more and more complicated relationships. Then, the idea of private property had introduced men to strife, envy, jealousy and exploitation; it had made man, who was naturally good and compassionate, more dependent on other men, which always involved hypocrisy and corruption and made man more uncertain and fearful than he had ever been.
Rousseau wished to bring man the genuine individual freedom he had known outside society. Strangely, for Rousseau this could only be achieved by the state. He was clear that ‘it is only by the force of the state that the liberty of its members can be secured’.16 The state embodied what he called the ‘general will’ of the masses. It represented the will of the political organism, which was above all the individual interests that constituted it, a general surrender to which formed the social contract. ‘Each citizen’ could only be ‘completely independent of all his fellow men’ by being ‘absolutely dependent upon the state’.
In his wish to secure an imagined absolute autonomy for the individual, where he would presumably be free to enjoy his individuality, Rousseau turned the state into an absolute suprahuman, mystical reality. The state was the liberator of man from society; it was the prerequisite for his moral development. What was needed was ‘an absolute surrender of the individual, with all of his rights and all of his powers’.
As he wrote:
It is good to know how to deal with men as they are, it is much better to make them what there is need that they should be. The most absolute authority is that which penetrates into a man’s inmost being, and concerns itself no less with his will than with his actions.17
It was with such abstract ideas – of a hypothetical equality, of the state as the guarantor of virtue and the engineer of human souls – that Rousseau, however inadvertently, set the stage for the terrors of not just the French Revolution or Hitlerism and Stalinism, but also of the well-intentioned regimes of the twentieth century, which destroyed human beings while claiming to remake them – the regimes which with their atrocities provided in dismal detail the answer to the question posed by Nietzsche, when he defined the state as ‘organized immorality’ and wondered how it was achieved ‘that a great mass does things the individual would never consent to do’.
But this wasn’t the history I knew in India: one in which revolutions weren’t usually triumphs of the oppressed and the virtuous, and the slogans of liberty, equality and fraternity often led not to peace and brotherhood on earth but to greater and more complicated forms of oppression.
There seemed something so beautifully neat about the Marxist assumption that man was a materialist, evaluated by what he produced through his labour, who could use technology to increase his mastery over nature, end his slavery to factory work, and build an efficient modern society where all, and not just a few, citizens shared equally the benefits of a controlled economy.
I did not suspect when I first came across them that such elaborate schemes were pure optimism on the part of a brilliant intellectual in exile in London. The dialectic was so impressive in its design: the bourgeoisie overthrowing the feudal lords, and then being overthrown in turn by the proletariat. It gave to human beings a central role as makers and shapers of their collective destiny. It affirmed the individual in his ability to change the world, and made it easy to believe Marx when he asserted that history explained the past, foretold the future, revealed the cunning of reason, and showed why one part of the world was superior to the other.
It didn’t bother me that Marx had little to say about ‘the anxiety, fear, sorrow, diseases, danger and death’ that even Adam Smith had worried about; and that he had simply taken over a sanguine modern vision in which man no longer needed to be burdened with his own sense of imperfection, and didn’t have to struggle in his inner life towards the good because he was good, simply by being human and playing his role in history.
I didn’t notice that Marx had offered no morality beyond that of the self-serving group, or class: the laws of history explained why the working class should eventually triumph without giving any reason why the values of this class or the group of revolutionaries should better serve the individual than those they overthrow.
The cunning of reason had long failed to work out in the way Marx had predicted. Here, Nietzsche was more prescient, predicting at a time when socialism was merely a dream that it ‘needs the most submissive subjugation of all citizens to the absolute state, the like of which has never existed’, and which was likely to maintain itself through ‘the most extreme terrorism’.
In 1922, while denouncing Buddhism as a nihilist religion and a bad influence on Europe, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam had wished for a return to the ‘schematic intellect and spirit of expediency’ of the French rationalist philosophers of the eighteenth century. Mandelstam wasn’t alone in his hopes. In the early 1920s, the nine million people killed in the First World War still weighed on the many artists and intellectuals in the West who thought that the Russian Revolution was inspired by the universal and secular values of the Enlightenment, which by reorganizing society
on scientific lines would help, as Mandelstam hoped, undermine the power of old irrationalisms like Buddhism.
For many of them, their hopes seemed close to fulfilment when in the 1920s Stalin began, with a schematic intellect and in the spirit of expediency, his Five Year Plans and programmes of collectivization and industrialization, in an ambitious attempt to modernize Russia.
The worst consequences of overly rational thinking – mass murder, forced labour and migrations, all deemed necessary by a bureaucratized state for the cause of a better future – were visible by the late 1930s when Mandelstam, transported to a labour camp in Siberia, became one of the millions of victims of Stalin. But this kind of news travelled late to places like India.
The distrust of science, and the idea of history and progress, which deepened in Europe from the beginning of the twentieth century, reached India even later. An artilleryman called Franz Rosenzweig had been one of the millions trapped in the mud and the filth of the trenches of the First World War. Writing on postcards during the war, he had accused ‘reason’ of having ‘devoured’ man and proclaimed that ‘it alone exists’:
Let man creep like a worm into the folds of naked earth before the fast-approaching volleys of a blind and pitiless death; let him sense there forcibly, inexorably, what he otherwise never senses: that his I would be but an It if he died; let him therefore cry his very I out with every cry that is still in his throat against the merciless one from whom there is no appeal and who threatens man with such unthinkable annihilation.18
‘In the face of all this misery,’ Rosenzweig wrote, ‘philosophy only smiles its vacuous smile.’ Writing after the war, which shattered the longest peace and greatest prosperity Europe’s recorded history had ever known, the French poet Paul Valéry was only one of the many European writers and intellectuals to suspect that the complacent European faith in history, rationality and science had brought about a new scale of devastation:
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