Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity

by Pavan K. Varma

  PAVAN K VARMA

  Becoming Indian

  The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  About the Author

  Introduction

  1. Choosing Exile

  2. The Imperishable Empire

  3. Macaulay’s Legacy

  4. Colonial Amnesia: A Tale of Two Cities

  5. Creativity and Distortion

  6. The Empire at Your Threshold

  7. Within the Global Village: Asymmetry and Co-option

  Author’s Note

  Notes

  Copyright Page

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  BECOMING INDIAN

  Pavan K. Varma studied history at St Stephen’s College, Delhi, and took a degree in law from Delhi University. A member of the Indian Foreign Service, he has served in Moscow, in New York at the Indian Mission to the United Nations, in London, where he was director of the Nehru Centre, and as India’s high commissioner in Cyprus. He is at present India’s ambassador to Bhutan.

  Pavan K. Varma’s books include Ghalib: The Man, The Times, Krishna: The Playful Divine, The Great Indian Middle Class, The Book of Krishna and Being Indian: Why the 21st Century Will Be India’s, all published by Penguin. He has also translated Gulzar (Selected Poems and Neglected Poems), Kaifi Azmi (Selected Poems) and Atal Bihari Vajpayee (21 Poems) into English for Penguin.

  ‘I do not want to stay in a house with all its windows and doors shut. I want a house with all its windows and doors open where the cultural breezes of all lands and nations blow through my house. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.’

  —Mahatma Gandhi

  Introduction

  Till just a few decades ago much of the world was carved into empires, the largest of these being the British, French, Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish empires. By the mid twentieth century independent countries had emerged from these empires. India’s independence on the midnight of 15 August 1947 hastened the demise of colonialism across continents. The world saw the end of the colonial era, and the birth of a world of ‘equal’ nations.

  The end of colonialism did not, however, signal the end of its consequences. The popular—and much celebrated—belief in India was that with the Tricolour replacing the Union Jack, a new phase of history had entirely, and definitively, replaced the old. This was, of course, the case politically; but in the field of culture and ideas history does not unfold in watertight compartments. There is a spill-over, a legacy that remains to be interrogated and dismantled. It is the unfinished business of the aftermath of Empire.

  This is especially so because the empires of the past were not only about the physical subjugation of peoples. Their real strength lay in the colonization of minds. Beyond the deserved euphoria of political liberation, there is a need, therefore, for a clear analysis of the effects of Empire on the culture and creative processes of newly, or relatively newly, independent nations. However, this is a very neglected area of study. Colonialism is studied for its political and economic impact, but rarely deeply investigated for its cultural and ideological consequences that continue to hold formerly subject people in thrall.

  The legacies of the past have an incredibly powerful momentum; they persist in a hundred myriad ways, affecting our language, beliefs, behaviour, self-esteem, creative expression, politics and everyday interactions. It is not often recognized how culturally disruptive the colonial experience is. Those who have never been colonized can never really know what it does to the psyche of a people. Those who have been are often not fully aware of—or are unwilling to accept—the degree to which they have been compromised.

  The authentic re-appropriation of one’s cultural space is thus one of the most critical unfinished agendas of our time. But the task is doubly difficult because even as we grapple with the consequences of the past, a new present is taking shape in the form of globalization. The fact of globalization is a given; it is an irreversible process, and in many respects not without benefit. But in the field of culture and identity it is not a neutral process. There is a dominant cultural paradigm largely fashioned by those who were the rulers in the past, and who continue to have the technology and wealth to propagate their message. In some respects, it is an even more powerful Empire because, while shorn of overt political domination, it is more pervasive, more intrusive and relentless. As a result, people who have not yet dismantled the legacies of their colonial past are also prone to becoming the victims of the inequities of the present. In this double jeopardy—where past empires reconfigure themselves as new cultural hegemonies—the victim is usually the last to know.

  This book is an attempt to understand this process, and seeks to do so rigorously but calmly, without xenophobic or chauvinistic anger. Its principal concern is that great cultural civilizations like India cannot become derivative, or reduce themselves to caricature or mimicry, measuring their progress solely by economic statistics. In the past we were an example of civilizational excellence, and we must endeavour to be the same again, capable of original and independent thinking. But this will require, first and foremost, an understanding of what the intervening period of colonialism did to us in the realms of language, culture and creativity. Only if the impact of that past is understood can we grapple with the forces of co-option and asymmetry at work today, and re-appropriate our culture authentically and with dignity—without which it is absurd to talk of global leadership.

  One of the great myths spawned by globalization is that we are all becoming mirror images of each other. Of course, there is now much greater give and take between nations and societies than perhaps at any other time in human history. But cultures retain their indelible differences, and that diversity must be respected. Cultures are products of a specific space and milieu, they are not interchangeable, and while they do evolve, they cannot be co-opted mindlessly as part of some global, cosmopolitan generality. The need for vigilance against such a possibility is all the greater because—again, contrary to the popular myth about globalization—cultural interactions don’t have a level playing field.

  Culture and identity will be the dominant agenda of the 21st century. As people across the world begin to dismantle the impositions of the past—or at least one hopes that they will—and begin to question the silent co-option inherent in globalization, they will challenge many of the easy assumptions of the present global order. This is an important and necessary process. The alternative is subterranean resentments building up and expressing themselves in retrogressive ways, including the lurch towards fundamentalism.

  In analyzing the impact of colonialism in the field of culture and identity, I have naturally focused on the India-Britain interaction. But this particular relationship is a template to understand what happened in varying degrees to all colonized people. The book begins on an autobiographical note, because personal histories cannot be separated from the operation of historical forces. The succeeding chapters deal with the pivotal issues of language, architecture and the arts, colonial amnesia, the strength and evolution of India’s cultural traditions, and the current state of our culture.

  Former colonial powers, too, must learn to live with the consequences of colonialism—Britain, for instance, has significant minorities from the Empire living within its borders now. For these immigrant minorities, the question of identity is of seminal importance, and the penultimate chapter of the book discusses this dilemma of identity. The final chapter analyses the nature of globalization in the area of culture, the symptoms of inequity inherent in it, and the dangers o
f co-option in our globalizing world.

  1

  Choosing Exile

  My father was born in Ghazipur, a small town on the banks of the Ganga, a little east of the holy city of Varanasi or Benares. The year must have been 1915 and the month possibly August, but I have no proof of the exact date. In those days parents often gave a different date for admission to school; the real date of birth with the exact time was used to draw up the horoscope, but I can’t trace that of my father. Not that it matters any more, for he has long been dead. My grandfather, then an upcoming lawyer, named his son Badrinath, after the eponymous pilgrimage town at 3000 metres in the Himalayas, where the great philosopher-saint Shankaracharya re-established the idol of Vishnu in the ninth century AD.

  How significant are these bare facts in the context of my father’s life? Does it matter where one is born? What hold does a place have on you? How is it different in essence to what is elsewhere? The basic elements cannot change: earth, mud, water, soil, grass, rock, the plains or the mountains or the sea. Ghazipur was a nondescript town, a dot on the sprawling plains of north India, which themselves were part of a larger subcontinent which in turn was part of an even larger Asia, and Asia was connected by land and by sea to other continents. The world is globalized by its very nature; any journey carried to one end will lead to the same spot eventually.

  And yet, for my father Ghazipur was home like no other place could be. He grew up there and went to the City High School, wearing a khaki shirt and pyjamas, and learnt to first read and write in Urdu and in Hindi. Though my grandfather was at the time learning to speak English in order to make a mark in the courts set up by the British, it was only in the sixth grade that my father was introduced to the language of the rulers, which had already become more powerful than all the languages of India put together. At home the family spoke Bhojpuri, the local dialect of the region. The elders knew English, but spoke it rarely within the family; when they had to, they did so competently but awkwardly, their writing and speech full of big words, as if to overcompensate for their linguistic insecurity. The family library consisted almost entirely of English books.

  Knowledge of English and English manners had become a factor of great consequence, a necessary tool for upward mobility. But in Ghazipur then this did not yet impinge on the self-assured culture of the soil. Seasons came and went, and each had a special significance and was celebrated in ways that had little to do with the Gregorian calendar. Chaitis and horis were sung in Vasant, the short-lived spring; through the long summer months, stress was laid on ‘cooling’ foods and sherbets, prepared according to recipes handed down from generation to generation; Sawan, the monsoon, was still the season of romance and rejoicing in a manner no Englishman or woman could understand; and the winter months were rich with festivals and new beginnings. There were folk songs in Bhojpuri for every occasion: sohars when a child was born; bannas in praise of the groom and bannis to welcome the bride; and heart-rending bidais when the time came for the bride to leave her parental home.

  Much later, after India had gained independence, I remember as a child participating in the kalam–dawaat puja at Ghazipur. On the third day after Diwali, the extended family gathered to pay tribute to Chitragupta, the mythical progenitor of the Kayashta community. Chitragupta had made the use of pen and ink the strength of the Kayasthas—making them not always great men of learning, but munshis, an indispensable breed of clerks needed by both the Mughals and the British. The children were seated on a rug, and on scrolls of paper preserved from the last puja, they wrote Om Shri Ganeshaya Namah in Hindi, in obeisance to the god of wisdom. The pen and ink were then blessed with akshat, rice mixed with vermilion, and the papers scrolled up and put back in the box, to be opened the next year when the ceremony would be repeated.

  The ritual was a simple one, and perpetuated as an act of memory, continuing a long tradition of belonging. My father was effortlessly a part of this continuity. But, at another level, he was also being torn away from it by the imperatives of the present. To ensure academic excellence and professional success in the Raj, he had to ‘liberate’ himself from his natural inheritance and prepare for a future which demanded a new ‘learning’ divorced from his milieu. As a child I was an avid Enid Blyton reader, and I can still recall my initial sense of bewilderment at her description of a glorious summer day when the sun was out without a trace of clouds. How could any child of the Indian plains relate to this and internalize it emotionally? I think now of how much more my father must have had to persevere in order to master Milton and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Coleridge.

  My father went on to win the Dun gold medal in English at Allahabad University, answering questions on English composition, idiom and usage, taking a paper on ‘The Growth and Structure of the English Language’, learning to do précis writing, and giving a viva voce designed ‘to test general reading and command of the language’. The irony is that English as an academic language was not even taught in England until a few decades earlier. In the early Victorian period English schools taught Greek and Latin; there were no professors of English literature in Oxford and Cambridge until the 1870s. But in India, schools had a well-developed curriculum to teach the language of the rulers, and students who wanted to get somewhere had little choice but to learn it. My father, Badrinath, must have spent a great deal of energy over the years to get the highest marks in English literature. In the process, unknown perhaps even to himself, he would have turned away, little by little, from his linguistic and cultural inheritance.

  After university, Badrinath prepared to qualify for the ICS, the Indian Civil Service. It was called the ‘heaven born’ service. Set up by the British in 1872, by 1882 it counted thirty-three members, including one Indian, Behari Lal Gupta, posted as a sessions judge in Bengal. But Behari Lal and the few Indians who would become magistrates and judges after him would never quite be the equals of their white colleagues. In 1873, a year after the ICS was set up, every British person had been exempted from trial by Indian magistrates. Exactly a decade later, the viceroy, Lord Rippon, proposed the Ilbert Bill that sought to give Indian magistrates the power to try Europeans too. But there was a huge outcry against the move. Annette Beveridge, the wife of Henry Beveridge, one of the more liberal members of the ICS, fumed at the possibility of being judged by the representative of a primitive civilization ‘which cares about stone idols, enjoys child marriage and secludes its women, and where at every point the fact of sex is present to the mind’.1 British supporters of the bill felt that Indians in the ICS had overcome the constraints of climate and the ‘prejudice of their race’ and had made rather good progress in emulating their rulers. In the end, however, Lord Rippon retreated under the criticism of his countrymen, and the bill when finally enacted, in 1884, allowed for Europeans to demand a trial by jury of which at least half the members were Europeans.

  To my father this background—that even those Indians who succeeded in the rigorous ICS exam were treated as inferior by their white counterparts, and that the service itself was created only to further British interests—was not material. The debate about the Ilbert Bill was several years in the past by the time he sat for the exam; few people remembered it or could afford to. Successful colonial policy is about erasing all memory of the origin of events by rationing out privilege and praise that eventually make the consequences of those events acceptable, even desirable. It rids institutions of their historical context, leaving behind only a sense of utility and status, of the opportunities in the present, not the humiliations of the past.

  But how can I blame my father for this amnesia? After all, the British-created ICS elite—‘more English in thought and feeling than Englishmen themselves’,2 as one British commentator noted approvingly—continued almost without change in independent India. To my father, the ICS signified the highest opportunity provided by the colonial rulers, and he worked very hard to seize it. For months, holed up in the heat of summer at the ancestral haveli in Ghazipur, he
worked on mastering British history and English literature, and improving his English accent and diction. An old woman—one of the servants of the house—sat stoically outside his room for hours; to her toe was tied a rope which, looping into the room through a roshandan, moved a pankha when she moved her foot. The year was 1940. Another war where millions would die was on the anvil. Led by Mahatma Gandhi, the freedom movement—where most political resolutions were drafted in eloquent English—was in full swing. The British did not know it then, but they had only a few more years left in India. In Ghazipur, oblivious to all of this, my father persevered diligently with Wordsworth and Gladstone, having never read Kalidasa or the Mahabharata, or learnt Sanskrit, or gone beyond the very basics of his mother tongue, Hindi, or written a single essay in his local dialect, Bhojpuri. In 1941, when the Ganga overflowed its banks after the monsoons, as it did every year, he made it to the ICS.

  It was an occasion of great pride for his family, and all of Ghazipur celebrated. At a felicitation ceremony, the students of the City High School presented him a scroll of honour. Decades later, I discovered it quite by chance in one of the locked rooms of the haveli. A dusty ornate frame enclosed a parchment fraying at the edges and moth-eaten in parts. The fading text was addressed to Badrinath Varma, Esq., M.A., I.C.S. (Selectee). ‘We, the present students of the City High School of Ghazipur, your old school, offer the most warm-hearted and respectful welcome to you as an elder brother at his return home on achieving entry into the highest of the country’s services by success at the stiffest competitive examination in the land,’ it began. ‘Today, ever to be remembered as a Red Letter Day in the annals of the school, you at our invitation stand before us—the student’s highest success personified … Hero among heroes of students, you hold up a beacon light for your younger brothers to follow … Throughout our student days we shall cherish you as our model which we are resolved to follow. To say more would be an empty vow. Our feelings at the parting moment are too deep for our words … Yet the poet’s words: