The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity

Author: Amartya Sen

India is an immensely diverse country with many distinct pursuits, vastly disparate convictions, widely divergent customs and a veritable feast of viewpoints.
The selection of focus here is mainly for three distinct reasons: the long history of the argumentative tradition in India, its contemporary relevance, and its relative neglect in ongoing cultural discussions.
Even though more than 80 per cent of Indians may be Hindu, the country has a very large Muslim population (the third largest among all the countries in the world – larger than the entire British and French populations put together), and a great many followers of other faiths: Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Parsees and others.
When the Muslim Pathan rulers of Bengal arranged for making good Bengali translations of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa in the fourteenth century (on which see Essay 3), their enthusiasm for the ancient Indian epics reflected their love of culture, rather than any conversion to Hinduism.
A basic doubt concerns the very creation of the world: did someone make it, was it a spontaneous emergence, and is there a God who knows what really happened? As is discussed in Essay 1, the Rigveda goes on to express radical doubts on these issues: ‘Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation?… perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not – the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows – or perhaps he does not know.’
Before he is persuaded to withdraw his allegations, Jāvāli gets time enough in the Rāmāyaṇa to explain in detail that ‘there is no after-world, nor any religious practice for attaining that’, and that ‘the injunctions about the worship of gods, sacrifice, gifts and penance have been laid down in the śāstras [scriptures] by clever people, just to rule over [other] people.’
The Chinese in the first millennium CE standardly referred to India as ‘the Buddhist kingdom’
It was indeed a Buddhist emperor of India, Ashoka, who, in the third century BCE, not only outlined the need for toleration and the richness of heterodoxy, but also laid down what are perhaps the oldest rules for conducting debates and disputations, with the opponents being ‘duly honoured in every way on all occasions’.
That political principle figures a great deal in later discussions in India, but the most powerful defence of toleration and of the need for the state to be equidistant from different religions came from a Muslim Indian emperor, Akbar.
If the immediate motivation for this book is social and political understanding in India, it has, I believe, some relevance also for the way the classification of the cultures of the world has become cemented into a shape that pays little or no attention to a great deal of our past and present.
In a poem in Four Quartets, Eliot summarizes Krishna’s view in the form of an admonishment: ‘And do not think of the fruit of action. / Fare forward.’ Eliot explains: ‘Not fare well, / But fare forward, voyagers.’4
Arjuna’s contrary arguments are not really vanquished, no matter what the ‘message’ of the Bhagavad Gītā is meant to be. There remains a powerful case for ‘faring well’, and not just ‘forward’.*
Despite that compulsion to ‘fare forward’, there was reason also for reflecting on Arjuna’s concerns: How can good come from killing so many people? And why should I seek victory, kingdom or happiness for my own side?
The univocal ‘message of the Gītā’ requires supplementation by the broader argumentative wisdom of the Mahābhārata, of which the Gītā is only one small part.
We have to take note not only of the opinions that won – or allegedly won – in the debates, but also of the other points of view that were presented and are recorded or remembered.
A defeated argument that refuses to be obliterated can remain very alive.
There is, however, a serious question to be asked as to whether the tradition of arguments and disputations has been confined to an exclusive part of the Indian population – perhaps just to the members of the male elite.
It is also perhaps worth noting that Sarojini Naidu, the first woman President of the Indian National Congress, was elected in 1925, fifty years earlier than the election of the first woman leader of a major British political party (Margaret Thatcher in 1975).
Women’s traditional role in debates and discussions has certainly been much less pronounced than that of men in India (as would also be true of most countries in the world).
in the Brihadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad we are told about the famous ‘arguing combat’ in which Yājñavalkya, the outstanding scholar and teacher, has to face questions from the assembled gathering of pundits, and here it is a woman scholar, Gārgī, who provides the sharpest edge to the intellectual interrogation.
Maitreyī wonders whether it could be the case that if ‘the whole earth, full of wealth’ were to belong just to her, she could achieve immortality through it.
Maitreyī remarks: ‘What should I do with that by which I do not become immortal?’10 Maitreyī’s rhetorical question has been repeatedly cited in Indian religious philosophy to illustrate both the nature of the human predicament and the limitations of the material world.
The arguments presented by women speakers in epics and classical tales, or in recorded history, do not always conform to the tender and peace-loving image that is often assigned to women. In the epic story of the Mahābhārata, the good King Yudhiṣṭhira, reluctant to engage in a bloody battle, is encouraged to fight the usurpers of his throne with ‘appropriate anger’, and the most eloquent instigator is his wife, Draupadī.11
The undermining of the superiority of the priestly caste played quite a big part in these initially rebellious religious movements, which include Jainism as well as Buddhism.
Bharadvāja responds not only by pointing to the considerable variations in skin colour within every caste (‘if different colours indicate different castes, then all castes are mixed castes’), but also by the more profound question: ‘We all seem to be affected by desire, anger, fear, sorrow, worry, hunger, and labour; how do we have caste differences then?’
‘Since members of all the four castes are children of God, they all belong to the same caste. All human beings have the same father, and children of the same father cannot have different castes.’
To look at a much later period, the tradition of ‘medieval mystical poets’, well established by the fifteenth century, included exponents who were influenced both by the egalitarianism of the Hindu Bhakti movement and by that of the Muslim Sufis, and their far-reaching rejection of social barriers brings out sharply the reach of arguments across the divisions of caste and class.
It is remarkable how many of the exponents of these heretical points of views came from the working class: Kabir, perhaps the greatest poet of them all, was a weaver, Dadu a cotton-carder, Ravi-das a shoe-maker, Sena a barber, and so on.
It would be a great mistake in that context to assume that because of the possible effectiveness of well-tutored and disciplined arguments, the argumentative tradition must, in general, favour the privileged and the well-educated, rather than the dispossessed and the deprived.
Does the richness of the tradition of argument make much difference to subcontinental lives today? I would argue it does, and in a great many different ways.
It has helped to make heterodoxy the natural state of affairs in India (more on this presently): persistent arguments are an important part of our public life.
The historical roots of democracy in India are well worth considering, if only because the connection with public argument is often missed, through the temptation to attribute the Indian commitment to democracy simply to the impact of British influence
The historical roots of democracy in India are well worth considering, if only because the connection with public argument is often missed, through the temptation to attribute the Indian commitment to democracy simply to the impact of British influence (despite the fact that such an influence should have worked similarly for a hundred other countries that emerged from an empire on which the sun used not to set).
the comprehensive acceptance by the armed forces (differently from the military in many other countries in Asia and Africa) as well as by the political parties (from the Communist left to the Hindu right, across the political spectrum) of the priority of civilian rule – no matter how inefficient and awkward (and how temptingly replaceable) democratic governance might have seemed.
Even though Indian democracy remains imperfect and flawed in several different ways (more on that later, in Essays 9–12), the ways and means of overcoming those faults can draw powerfully on the argumentational tradition.
It is very important to avoid the twin pitfalls of (1) taking democracy to be just a gift of the Western world that India simply accepted when it became independent, and (2) assuming that there is something unique in Indian history that makes the country singularly suited to democracy.
Traditions of public discussion exist across the world, not just in the West.15
Balloting can be seen as only one of the ways – albeit a very important way – to make public discussions effective, when the opportunity to vote is combined with the opportunity to speak and listen, without fear.
James Buchanan, the founder of the contemporary discipline of public choice theory, has argued: ‘the definition of democracy as “government by discussion” implies that individual values can and do change in the process of decision-making.’
Alexander received some political lecturing as he roamed around north-west India in the fourth century BCE. For example, when Alexander asked a group of Jain philosophers why they were paying so little attention to the great conqueror, he got the following – broadly anti-imperial – reply (as reported by Arrian): King Alexander, every man can possess only so much of the earth’s surface as this we are standing on. You are but human like the rest of us, save that you are always busy and up to no good, travelling so many miles from your home, a nuisance to yourself and to others!… You will soon be dead, and then you will own just as much of the earth as will suffice to bury you.*
The so-called ‘Buddhist councils’, which aimed at settling disputes between different points of view, drew delegates from different places and from different schools of thought. The first of the four principal councils was held in Rājagriha shortly after Gautama Buddha’s death; the second about a century later in Vaiśālī; and the last occurred in Kashmir in the second century CE.
The so-called ‘Buddhist councils’, which aimed at settling disputes between different points of view, drew delegates from different places and from different schools of thought. The first of the four principal councils was held in Rājagriha shortly after Gautama Buddha’s death; the second about a century later in Vaiśālī; and the last occurred in Kashmir in the second century CE. But the third – the largest and the best known of these councils – occurred under the patronage of Emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE, in the then capital of India, Pāṭaliputra (now called Patna).19
Ashoka tried to codify and propagate what must have been among the earliest formulations of rules for public discussion – a kind of ancient version of the nineteenth-century ‘Robert’s Rules of Order’.20
Ashoka’s championing of public discussion has had echoes in the later history of India, but none perhaps as strong as the Moghal Emperor Akbar’s sponsorship and support for dialogues between adherents of different faiths, nearly two thousand years later.
Akbar’s overarching thesis that ‘the pursuit of reason’ rather than ‘reliance on tradition’ is the way to address difficult problems of social harmony included a robust celebration of reasoned dialogues.
In the deliberative conception of democracy, the role of open discussion, with or without sponsorship by the state, has a clear relevance. While democracy must also demand much else,22 public reasoning, which is central to participatory governance, is an important part of a bigger picture.
The long history of heterodoxy has a bearing not only on the development and survival of democracy in India, it has also richly contributed, I would argue, to the emergence of secularism in India, and even to the form that Indian secularism takes, which is not exactly the same as the way secularism is defined in parts of the West.
Buddhism, the practice of which is now rather sparse in India, was the dominant religion of the country for nearly a thousand years.
Jainism, on the other hand, born at the same time as Buddhism, has survived as a powerful Indian religion over two and a half millennia.
Parsees started arriving in the late seventh century, as soon as persecution of Zoroastrianism began in Persia.
The Baha’is were among the last groups to seek refuge in India, in the last century.
Each religious community managed to retain its identity within India’s multi-religious spectrum.
The toleration of diversity has also been explicitly defended by strong arguments in favour of the richness of variation, including fulsome praise of the need to interact with each other, in mutual respect, through dialogue.
Despite his deep interest in other religions and his brief attempt to launch a new religion, Din-ilahi (God’s religion), based on a combination of good points chosen from different faiths, Akbar did remain a good Muslim himself.
While the historical background of Indian secularism can be traced to the trend of thinking that had begun to take root well before Akbar, the politics of secularism received a tremendous boost from Akbar’s championing of pluralist ideals, along with his insistence that the state should be completely impartial between different religions.
Kālidāsa’s Meghadūtam (The Cloud Messenger), which applauds the beauty of varieties of human customs and behaviour through the imagined eyes of a cloud that carries a message of longing from a banished husband to his beloved wife, as the cloud slowly journeys across fifth-century India.
there are two principal approaches to secularism, focusing respectively on (1) neutrality between different religions, and (2) prohibition of religious associations in state activities.
It could, quite possibly, be justified for some other reason (other than the alleged violation of secularism), for example on the grounds that the headscarves are symbols of gender inequality and can be seen as demeaning to women, or that women (especially young girls) do not really have the freedom to decide what to wear, and that dress decisions are imposed on them by more powerful members of families (with male dominance).
As Ashoka put it in the third century BCE: ‘concord, therefore, is meritorious, to wit, hearkening and hearkening willingly to the Law of Piety as accepted by other people.’
Sanskrit not only has a bigger body of religious literature than exists in any other classical language, it also has a larger volume of agnostic or atheistic writings than in any other classical language.
In addition to the denial of God, there is also a rejection of the soul, and an assertion of the material basis of the mind:
In addition to the denial of God, there is also a rejection of the soul, and an assertion of the material basis of the mind: ‘[from these material elements] alone, when transformed into the body, intelligence is produced, just as the inebriating power is developed from the mixing of certain ingredients; and when these are destroyed, intelligence at once perishes also.’
An adequately inclusive understanding of Indian heterodoxy is particularly important for appreciating the reach and range of heterodoxy in the country’s intellectual background and diverse history.
The exaggerated focus on religiosity has also contributed to an underestimation of the reach of public reasoning in India and the diversity of its coverage. For example, Kauṭilya’s classic treatise on political economy and governance, Arthaśāstra (translatable as ‘Economics’), initially composed in the fourth century BCE, is basically a secular treatise, despite the respectful gestures it makes to religious and social customs.
It is not hard to see that the possibility of scientific advance is closely connected with the role of heterodoxy, since new ideas and discoveries have to emerge initially as heterodox views, which differ from, and may be in conflict with, established understanding.
We can argue that the flowering of Indian science and mathematics that began in the Gupta period (led particularly by Āryabhaṭa in the fifth century CE, Varāhamihira in the sixth, and Brahmagupta in the seventh) benefited from the tradition of scepticism and questioning which had been flourishing in India at that time.
While we may be tempted to rely on such connections, ‘there might arise a doubt as to the existence of the invariable connection in this particular case
‘Nor can inference be the means of knowledge of the universal proposition, since in the case of this inference we should also require another inference to establish it,
Lokāyata approach
In this respect, the rationale of the Lokāyata approach is quite close to a methodological point that Francis Bacon would make with compelling clarity in 1605 in his treatise The Advancement of Learning.
‘The registering and proposing of doubts has a double use,’ Bacon said. One use is straightforward: it guards us ‘against errors’. The second use, Bacon argued, involved the role of doubts in initiating and furthering a process of enquiry, which has the effect of enriching our investigations.
In addition to the mathematical advances reflected in Āryabhaṭa’s work, the astronomical departures included, among a number of other contributions, the following: (1) an explanation of lunar and solar eclipses in terms respectively of the earth’s shadow on the moon and the moon’s obscuring of the sun, combined with methods of predicting the timing and duration of eclipses; (2) rejection of the standard view of an orbiting sun that went around the earth, in favour of the diurnal motion of the earth; (3) an identification of the force of gravity to explain why objects are not thrown out as the earth rotates; and (4) a proposal of the situational variability of the idea of ‘up’ and ‘down’ depending on where one is located on the globe, undermining the ‘high above’ status of heavenly objects (but directly in line with the philosophy of relying on what Jāvāli called ‘the province of human experience’).
In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela notes that as a young boy he learned about the importance of democracy from the practice of the local African meetings that were held in the regent’s house in Mqhekezweni: Everyone who wanted to speak did so. It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and laborer.… The foundation of self-government was that all men were free to voice their opinions and equal in their value as citizens.50
It is in this broad context that one can see the importance of the contributions made by India’s argumentative tradition to its intellectual and social history, and why they remain relevant today.
Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore, who was proud of the fact that his family background reflected ‘a confluence of three cultures, Hindu, Mohammedan and British’,
Just consider how terrible the day of your death will be. Others will go on speaking, and you will not be able to argue back.
I will use the Sanskrit word swīkriti, in the sense of ‘acceptance’, in particular the acknowledgement that the people involved are entitled to lead their own lives.
If the norm of acceptance and of participation leads naturally, in the context of a contemporary society, to political equality within the broad structure of a democracy (that translation is easy enough), it does not in any automatic way extend that political symmetry into the promotion of social and economic equality.
The right to comprehensive participation in democratic politics can be the basis of social and political use of ‘voice’ – through arguments and agitations – to advance the cause of equality in different spheres of life.
The argumentative tradition can be a strong ally of the underdog, particularly in the context of democratic practice.
The British belief, very common in imperial days and not entirely absent now, that it was the Raj that somehow ‘created’ India reflects not only a pride in alleged authorship, but also some bafflement about the possibility of accommodating so much heterogeneity within the coherent limits of what could be taken to be a pre-existing country.
in the seventh century CE, as the Chinese scholar Yi Jing returned to China after spending ten years in India, he was moved to ask the question: ‘Is there anyone, in the five parts of India, who does not admire China?’7
Consider, for example, the emergence, far less often discussed than it should be, of the city of Ujjain, in the early centuries of the first millennium CE, as the location of the ‘principal meridian’ for Indian calendars, serving for Indian astronomers as something like an Indian Greenwich.
Ujjain (or Ujjayinī, as it was then called), as an ancient Indian city, moved from its role as the capital of Avanti (later, Malwa) in the seventh century BCE, to become the capital of the Śaka royalty, and most prominently served as the base of the later Gupta dynasty, in the period of the flowering of Indian mathematics and science.
there are clearly many shared elements in the subcontinental heritage, drawing as they do on the multicultural history of the region. These elements have a widespread bearing on the search, now extremely important, for a safer and more prosperous South Asia.12 They apply in particular to the fostering of discussions and dialogues to counteract the tensions created by – and the actual dangers resulting from – the development of nuclear bombs and deadly missiles in both India and Pakistan, and of course to resolving long-standing differences on Kashmir.*
The argumentative route has its uses. We can try to out-talk the ‘unknown’ – and dumb – power of Fate.
I told my grandfather, some years later, that he had been absolutely wrong. ‘Not at all,’ replied my grandfather, ‘you have addressed the religious question, and you have placed yourself, I see, in the atheistic – the Lokāyata – part of the Hindu spectrum!’
The important thing about a man is his dharma [roughly, the personal basis of behaviour], not necessarily his religion.’1
Some of the most articulate and ardent advocates of tolerance and mutual respect in India were not themselves Hindu, such as Ashoka, who was a Buddhist, and Akbar, who was a Muslim, but they too belonged to a broad culture in which Hindu heterodoxy was vigorously present.
In contrast with this large view, many Hindu political activists today seem bent on doing away with the broad and tolerant parts of the Hindu tradition in favour of a uniquely ascertained – and often fairly crude – view which, they demand, must be accepted by all.
Hindutva (literally, ‘the quality of Hinduism’)
Indeed, the concept of Hindutva was elaborately discussed in a book of that name, published in 1923, authored by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, often called ‘Veer’ (valiant) Savarkar, a Hindu chauvinist leader of remarkable energy.
While it is often assumed that in pre-partition India the claim that the Hindus and Muslims formed ‘two distinct nations’ – not two parts of the same Indian nation – was formulated by Muhammad Ali Jinnah (in the context of making a case for the partition of the country on religious lines), it was in fact Savarkar who had floated the idea well before – more than fifteen years earlier than – Jinnah’s first invoking of the idea. Nathuram Godse, who murdered Mahatma Gandhi for his failure to support the demands of Hindu politics of the day, was a disciple of Savarkar.8
The Easterners wanted separation for reasons that linked firmly with language and literature (particularly the place of their mother tongue, Bengali) and also with political – including secular – priorities.
Is the historical reasoning behind seeing India as a mainly Hindu country less problematic and more convincing than the statistical argument?
Aside from the obvious and prominent presence of Muslims in India for well over a millennium (Muslim Arab traders settled in India from the eighth century), India was not a ‘Hindu country’ even before the arrival of Islam. Buddhism was the dominant religion in India for nearly a millennium.
emergence of Sikhism in India as a universalist conviction that drew on both the Hindu and Islamic traditions but developed a new religious understanding.
specialized success has been achieved by the Hindutva movement through agitation and propaganda that build on what is trumpeted as a historical ‘guilt’ of the Muslim conquerors who overran India.
Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, coming from Afghanistan, repeatedly invaded north and west India in the eleventh century, devastated several cities and ruined many temples, including particularly famous ones in Mathura, Kanauj, and what is now Kathiawar (where the wonderful Somnath temple had been widely renowned for its treasures).
Hindutva accounts of Muslim rulers tend to take such a partisan view that they end up being very like the reading of Indian history that Rabindranath Tagore had ridiculed as ‘foreigner’s history’. In an essay written more than a century ago (in 1902), he wrote: The history of India that we read in schools and memorize to pass examinations is the account of a horrible dream – a nightmare through which India has passed. It tells of unknown people from no one knows where entering India; bloody wars breaking out; father killing son and brother killing brother to snatch at the throne; one set of marauders passing away with another coming in to take its place; Pathan and Mughal, Portuguese, French and English – all helping to add to the nightmarish confusion.
the very successful and extremely popular Bengali translations of these epics owed much to the efforts of the Muslim Pathan kings of Bengal.
Aurangzeb’s son, also called Akbar, rebelled against his father in 1681, and joined the Hindu Rajput kings to fight his father.
Shah Jahan (the creator of the Taj Mahal), whom Aurangzeb had killed on the way to the Moghal throne, had learned Sanskrit and studied Hindu philosophy extensively.
the heir to the Moghal throne had himself translated into Persian some significant parts of the Upaniṣads, the ancient Hindu scriptures, and compared them – not unfavourably – with the Koran. It is this translation, which Dara did with the assistance of Hindu pundits, that gave many people in West Asia and Europe their first glimpse of Hindu philosophy.
The solidarity of the diverse members of the Sangh Parivar is greatly helped by taking a united view of India’s history as essentially a ‘Hindu civilization’
The rewriting of India’s history in line with the message of Hindutva is extremely important for the cohesion of different elements in the Sangh Parivar. They can differ on political means and tactics – varying from soft-spoken advocacy to hard-headed violence – but still agree on a grand Hindu vision of India.
The rapidly reorganized National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) became busy, from shortly after the BJP’s assumption of office, not only in producing fresh textbooks for Indian school children, but also in deleting sections from books produced earlier by NCERT itself (under pre-BJP management), written by reputed Indian historians.
many well-established and respected Indian historians did question, with reasoned justification, the accuracy and authenticity of the claims made by Hindutva ideologues.
Given the priorities of Hindutva, the rewriting of India’s history tends to favour internal and external isolation, in the form of separating out the celebration of Hindu achievements from the non-Hindu parts of its past and also from intellectual and cultural developments outside India.
It had many special achievements, including remarkable town planning, organized storage (of grain in particular), and extraordinary drainage systems (unequalled, if I am any judge, in the subcontinent in the following four thousand years).
arrival of the Indo-Europeans (sometimes called Aryans) from the West, most likely in the second millennium BCE, riding horses (unknown in the Indus valley civilization), and speaking a variant of early Sanskrit (the Vedic Sanskrit, as it is now called).
The Hindutva view of history, which traces the origin of Indian civilization to the Vedas has, therefore, the double ‘difficulty’ of (1) having to accept that the foundational basis of Hindu culture came originally from outside India, and (2) being unable to place Hinduism at the beginning of Indian cultural history and its urban heritage.
The definitive demonstration of the fraud came from Michael Witzel, Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University, in a joint essay with Steve Farmer.
It is important to appreciate the distinction between religious strifes, on the one hand, and political discords based on utilizing communal demography, on the other.
But as the delirium quietened, the excitement of Hindutva activism delivered very little to sectarian politics in the four state elections held a few months later, in February 2003.
This is nothing short of a sustained effort to miniaturize the broad idea of a large India – proud of its heterodox past and its pluralist present – and to replace it by the stamp of a small India, bundled around a drastically downsized version of Hinduism.
There is a desire for national or cultural pride, but some uncertainty about what to take pride in.
The importance of such recollections does not lie merely in the celebration of history, but also in understanding the continuing relevance of these early departures in theory and practice.
There has been support as well as denial of such rights in the history of both Europe and India, and it is hard to see that the Western experience in support of these rights is peculiarly ‘unique among civilized societies’.
Colonial undermining of self-confidence had the effect of driving many Indians to look for sources of dignity and pride in some special achievements in which there was less powerful opposition – and also less competition – from the imperial West, including India’s alleged excellence in spirituality and the outstanding importance of her specific religious practices.15 By creating their ‘own domain of sovereignty’ (as Partha Chatterjee has described it),16 the Indians – like other people dominated by colonialism – have often sought their self-respect in unusual fields and special interests. This has been associated with an extraordinary neglect of Indian works on reasoning, science, mathematics and other so-called ‘Western spheres of success’.
Despite those early deliberations in independent India, the intellectual agendas related to national politics have tended to move firmly in other directions since then, influenced by, among other factors, the sectarianism of the Hindutva movement and the cultural ignorance of many of the globalizing modernizers.
Yet the historical roots of democracy and secularism in India, no less than the reach of its scientific and mathematical heritage, demand serious attention in contemporary India.
If Akbar was well ahead of his time in arranging state-organized inter-faith dialogues (possibly the first in the world), Ashoka must also be regarded as remarkable in his interest and involvement, in the third century BCE, in the rules of discussion and confrontation that should govern arguments between holders of diverse beliefs.
Also Ashoka, the Buddhist emperor, was a pioneer in creating hospitals for public use in the third century BCE.
One of the sad features of a narrowly Hinduized view of India’s past is that the justifiable pride Indians can take in the achievements of non-Hindu as well as Hindu accomplishments in India is drowned in the sectarianism of seeing India as mainly a vehicle for Hindu thought and practice.
It is also interesting to note that the greatest grammarian in Sanskrit (indeed possibly in any language), namely Pāṇini, who systematized and transformed Sanskrit grammar and phonetics around the fourth century BCE, was of Afghan origin (he describes his village on the banks of the river Kabul).
It is not often realized that even the word ‘Mandarin’, standing as it does for a central concept in Chinese culture, is derived from a Sanskrit word, Mantrī, which went from India to China via Malaya.
Rabindranath Tagore put the rationale well, in a letter to C. F. Andrews: ‘Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin.’*
‘The charka does not require anyone to think; one simply turns the wheel of the antiquated invention endlessly, using the minimum of judgement and stamina.’
Gandhi, who was then deeply involved in the fight against untouchability (the barbaric system inherited from India’s divisive past, in which ‘lowly people’ were kept at a physical distance), extracted a positive lesson from the tragic event. ‘A man like me’, Gandhi argued, ‘cannot but believe this earthquake is a divine chastisement sent by God for our sins’ – in particular the sins of untouchability.
The duality Berlin points to is well reflected also in Tagore’s attitude towards cultural diversity. He wanted Indians to learn what was going on elsewhere, how others lived, what they valued, and so on, while remaining interested and involved in their own culture and heritage.
India chose a song of Tagore’s (‘Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka’, which can be roughly translated as ‘the leader of people’s minds’) as its national anthem. Since Bangladesh would later choose another song of Tagore’s (‘Amar Sonar Bangla’) as its national anthem, he may be the only one ever to have written the national anthems of two different countries.
the observation made by E. P. Thompson (whose father Edward Thompson had written one of the first major biographies of Tagore27): All the convergent influences of the world run through this society: Hindu, Moslem, Christian, secular; Stalinist, liberal, Maoist, democratic socialist, Gandhian. There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or East that is not active in some Indian mind.
In Ray’s films and in his writings, we see explorations of at least three general themes on cultures and their interrelations: the importance of distinctions between different local cultures and their respective individualities, the necessity to understand the deeply heterogeneous character of each local culture (even that of a community, not to mention a region or a country), and the great need for inter-cultural communication while recognizing the difficulties of such intercourse.
In the Vienna conference on human rights in 1993, the Foreign Minister of Singapore, citing differences between Asian and European traditions, argued that ‘universal recognition of the ideal of human rights can be harmful if universalism is used to deny or mask the reality of diversity’.
The difficulties of understanding each other across the boundaries of culture are undoubtedly great. This applies to the cinema, but also to other art forms as well, including literature. For example, the inability of most foreigners – sometimes even other Indians – to see the astonishing beauty of Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry (a failure that we Bengalis find so exasperating) is a good illustration of just such a problem.
even when Ray’s films deal with problems that are just as intense (such as the coming of the Bengal famine of 1943 in Ashani Sanket), the comfort of the ready explanation through the prominent presence of menacing villains is altogether avoided. Indeed, villains are remarkably rare – almost completely absent – in Satyajit Ray’s films.
If Salaam Bombay! and The City of Joy are, ultimately, in the ‘cops and robbers’ tradition (except that there are no ‘good cops’ in Salaam Bombay!), the Ray films have neither cops nor robbers,
The acknowledgement and emphasis on the culture of the people who inhabit Ray’s films is in no way a denial of the legitimacy of seeking interest in ideas and practices originating elsewhere.
The Italian influence did not make Pather Panchali anything other than an Indian film – it simply helped it to become a great Indian film.
It has become quite common to cite the foreign origin of an idea or a tradition as an argument against its use, and this has been linked up with an anti-modernist priority.
but the fear that its Western origin would leave us without a model that is our ‘own’ is a peculiarly parochial anxiety.
Even in matters of day-to-day living, the fact that the chili, a basic ingredient of traditional Indian cooking, was brought to India by the Portuguese from the ‘new world’, does not make current Indian cooking any less Indian.
There is an important aspect of anti-modernism which tends to question – explicitly or by implication – the emphasis to be placed on what is called ‘Western science’.
The reasoning behind this anti-foreign attitude is flawed in several distinct ways. First, so-called ‘Western science’ is not the special possession of Europe and America.
Second, irrespective of where the discoveries and inventions took place, the methods of reasoning used in science and mathematics give them some independence of local geography and cultural history.
Third, our decisions about the future need not be parasitic on the type of past we have experienced.
the point is that there is no escape from the necessity to scrutinize and assess ideas and proposals no matter whether they are seen as pro-modern or anti-modern.
Modernity is not only a befuddling notion, it is also basically irrelevant as a pointer of merit or demerit in assessing contemporary priorities.
These arguments, developed particularly in Singapore, Malaysia and China, appeal to the differences between ‘Asian’ and ‘Western’ values to dispute the importance of civil rights, particularly freedom of expression (including press freedoms) in Asian countries.
First, even if it were shown that freedoms of this kind have been less important in Asian thoughts and traditions than in the West, that would still be an unconvincing way of justifying the violation of these freedoms in Asia.
Second, it is by no means clear that, historically, greater importance has been systematically attached to freedom and tolerance in the West than in Asia.
There is little evidence that Plato or St Augustine were more tolerant and less authoritarian than Confucius.
There are indeed many differences between Europe and India, but there are sharp differences also within India itself, or within Europe.
My old teacher Joan Robinson used to say: ‘Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.’
The problem is, of course, even larger when there are attempts at generalization about ‘Asian’ values. Asia is where about 60 per cent of the world’s entire population live.
The celebration of these differences – the ‘dizzying contrasts’ – is far from what can be found in the laboured generalizations about ‘our culture’, and the vigorous pleas, increasingly vocal, to keep ‘our culture’, ‘our modernity’ distinctly unique and immune from the influence of ‘their culture’, ‘their modernity’.
In our heterogeneity and in our openness lies our pride, not our disgrace.
This has particularly drawn attention to the important fact that the self-identity of post-colonial societies is deeply affected by the power of the colonial cultures and their forms of thought and classification.
I will discuss these questions and argue that focusing on India’s ‘specialness’ misses, in important ways, crucial aspects of Indian culture and traditions.
Attempts from outside India to understand and interpret the country’s traditions can be put into at least three distinct categories, which I shall call exoticist approaches, magisterial approaches and curatorial approaches.
While it is true that any useful knowledge gives its possessor some power in one form or another, this may not be the most remarkable aspect of that knowledge, nor the primary reason for which this knowledge is sought.
At one level Mill’s rather elementary error lies in not knowing what a decimal or a place-value system is, but his ignorant smugness cannot be understood except in terms of his implicit unwillingness to believe that a very sophisticated invention could have been managed by such primitive people.
The contrast between Alberuni’s curatorial approach and James Mill’s magisterial pronouncements could not be sharper.
But while Gandhi may have been right to value external criticism as a way of inducing people to be self-critical, the impact of the ‘magisterial approach’ certainly gives American perceptions of India a very clear slant.
Megasthenes’ Indika, describing India in the early third century BCE, can claim to be the first outsider’s book on India;
Not many would weep, for example, for Maharishi Mahesh Yogi when the Beatles stopped lionizing him and left suddenly; in answer to the Maharishi’s question of why they were leaving, John Lennon said: ‘You are the cosmic one; you ought to know.’
The exoticist and magisterial approaches have bemused and befuddled that understanding even as they have drawn attention to India in the West. The curatorial approaches have been less guilty of this, and indeed historically have played a major part in bringing out and drawing attention to the different aspects of Indian culture, including its non-mystical and nonexotic features.
In describing the rise and decline of Rabindranath Tagore in London’s literary circles, E. M. Forster remarked that London was a city of ‘boom and bust’, but that description applies more generally (that is, not confined only to literary circles in London) to the Western appreciation of exotic aspects of Eastern cultures.
Indian traditions in mathematics, logic, science, medicine, linguistics or epistemology may be well known to the Western specialist, but they play little part in the general Western understanding of India.
Western perceptions and characterizations of India have had considerable influence on the self-perception of Indians themselves.
In contrast, the cutting edge of science and mathematics is inevitably related to formal education and preparation. In this context, the immense backwardness of India in mass education (an inheritance from the British period but not adequately remedied yet) compounds the dissociation of elite science and mathematics from the lives of the non-elite.
a comparison of a self-consciously non-elitist history of India with the typically classical understanding of the intellectual heritage of the West produces a false contrast between the respective intellectual traditions. In comparing Western thoughts and creations with those in India, the appropriate counterpoints of Aristotelian or Stoic or Euclidian analyses are not the traditional beliefs of the Indian rural masses or of the local wise men but the comparably analytical writings of, say, Kauṭilya or Nāgārjuna or Āryabhaṭa.
The extensive contacts that were generated between India and China through Buddhist connections were not confined to the subject matter of Buddhism only.
A particular focus of attention is the catalytic role that the connections inspired by Buddhism, and fostered by Buddhist contacts, played in advancing what can be broadly described as secular pursuits.
There are also plentiful references in the Sanskrit literature in this period to many Chinese products other than silk that made their way into India, varying from camphor (cīnaka), fennel (cīnāka), vermilion (cīnapiṣṭa) and high-quality leather (cīnasi) to pear (cīnarājaputra) and peach (cīnani).6
Despite the respect in which the India-returned Chinese scholars were viewed in their own country, including the royal patronage they often received, it is important not to overlook the resistance to Indian – particularly Buddhist – influence that was also widespread in
‘Why should a Chinese allow himself to be influenced by Indian ways?’ was, in fact, ‘one of the objections most frequently raised by Confucians and Daoists once Buddhism had acquired a foothold on Chinese soil’.
One of the positive contributions Buddhist connections produced in China is the general sense that even the Chinese must, to some extent, look outwards.
Even though India was commonly referred to, at that time, as ‘the Western kingdom’ (giving China a more central position), the Buddhist perspective tended to favour placing India at the centre of things.
On the other side, Buddhist connections also helped to moderate Indian self-centredness and sense of civilizational exclusiveness.
‘In works on the Chinese sciences,’ Jean-Claude Martzloff has noted in his history of Chinese mathematics, ‘no question has been touched on more often than that of the circulation of ideas,’ and yet ‘we still know very little about the subject.’
A good example is the transformation of Āryabhaṭa’s Sanskrit term jya for what we now call sine: jya was translated, through proximity of sound, into Arabic jiba (a meaningless word in Arabic) and later transformed into jaib (a bay or a cove in Arabic), and ultimately into the Latin word sinus (meaning a bay or a cove), from which the modern term ‘sine’ is derived.
In scrutinizing these Sino-Indian connections in science, which were evidently important, we have to assess the role of Buddhism as a catalyst.
That Buddhism had an impact on Chinese literature cannot come as a surprise. The use of religious and mythological themes for poetry, fiction and drama is standard practice around the world, and any new source of intellectual stimulation cannot but have its impact on what is written and read and enjoyed.
some of the earliest open public meetings in the world, aimed specifically at settling disputes between different views, took place in India in elaborately organized Buddhist ‘councils’, where adherents of different points of view tried to argue out their differences, particularly on public practices as well as religious beliefs.
By the time economic reforms were introduced in China in 1979, China had a lead of fourteen years over India in longevity.
With the reforms of 1979, the Chinese economy surged ahead spectacularly and grew much faster than India’s more modest performance
couple of factors, both of which link to the issue of democracy, can help to explain the slackening of Chinese progress in the art of prolonging life, despite being helped by its extremely rapid economic growth. First, the reforms of 1979 led to the ending of free public health insurance, and it was now necessary to buy private health insurance at one’s own cost
A couple of factors, both of which link to the issue of democracy, can help to explain the slackening of Chinese progress in the art of prolonging life, despite being helped by its extremely rapid economic growth. First, the reforms of 1979 led to the ending of free public health insurance, and it was now necessary to buy private health insurance at one’s own cost
Second, democracy also makes a direct contribution to health care by bringing social failures into public scrutiny.
While political movements have been very effective in dealing with some wrongs, other wrongs have not received anything like sufficient redress or even serious engagement.
While we must give credit where it is due, Indian democracy has to be judged also by the strength and reach of public reasoning and its actual accomplishments.
social progress and equity – has fared much worse than democracy itself: not quite an immeasurable failure, but certainly a measurable underperformance.
India’s economic expansion was particularly slow before the 1980s, especially in comparison with the spectacular performance of Asian economies further east,
If there is something that India can learn from China’s post-reform experience in the 1980s onwards about making skilful use of global markets, there is also much that India can assimilate from China’s pre-reform experience in rapidly expanding the delivery of basic education and elementary health care.
The possibilities of public agitation on issues of societal inequality and deprivation are now beginning to be more utilized than before.
The remedy for many of the central failures of Indian society is closely linked to broadening the force and range of political arguments and social demands.
It is not enough to continue to have systematic elections, to safeguard political liberties and civil rights, to guarantee free speech and an open media. Nor is it adequate to eliminate famine, or to reduce the lead of China in longevity and survival.
class is not only important on its own, it can also magnify the impact of other contributors to inequality, enlarging the penalties imposed by them.
first, the need for an integrated understanding of the contribution of class in the combined impact of diverse sources of inequality; and second, the possibility of ‘friendly fire’, which requires us to rethink the old battle lines against inequality.
The class dimension of sectarian violence tends to receive inadequate attention, even in newspaper accounts, because of unifocal reporting that concentrates on the divisive communal identity of the victims rather than on their unified class identity.
What we need, therefore, is some kind of a dual recognition of the role and reach of class that takes into account its non-uniqueness as well as its transformational function.
The absence of a conceptual congruence between different types of deprivation does not preclude their empirical proximity along a big dividing line, which is a central feature of classical class analysis.
Calculations of general undernourishment – what is sometimes called ‘protein-energy malnutrition’ – show that it is nearly twice as high in India as in sub-Saharan Africa on the average.
Indeed, it is amazing to hear persistent repetition of the false belief that India has managed the challenge of hunger very well since independence. This is based on a profound confusion between famine prevention, which is a simple achievement, and the avoidance of endemic undernourishment and hunger, which is a much more complex task.
The immediate explanation is not hard to find. The accumulation of stocks results from the government’s commitment to high minimum support prices for food grain – for wheat and rice in particular. But a regime of high prices in general (despite a gap between procurement prices and consumers’ retail prices) both expands procurement and depresses demand. The bonanza for food producers and sellers is matched by the privation of food consumers. Since the biological need for food is not the same thing as the economic entitlement to food (what people can afford to buy given their economic circumstances and the prices), the large stocks procured are hard to get rid of, despite rampant undernourishment across the country. The very price system that generated a massive supply kept the hands – and the mouths – of the poorer consumers away from food.
the overall effect of the subsidy is more spectacular in transferring money to medium and large farmers with food to sell, than in giving food to the undernourished consumers.
Sometimes the very institutions that were created to overcome disparities and barriers have tended to act as reactionary influences in reinforcing inequity.

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The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity

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