IdeaIndia excerpt

From The Idea of India by Sunil Khilnani

 In the first instance, the history of independent India can be seen, most narrowly but also most sharply, as the history of a state: one of the first, largest and poorest of many created by the ebb of European empire after the end of the Second World War. - - -     Rather more expansively, the period of Indian history since 1947 might be seen as the adventure of a political idea: democracy. From this perspective, the history of independent India appears at the third moment in the great democratic experiment launched at the end of the eighteenth century by the American and French revolutions. - - -     The history of a state and the history of an idea: each provides  ready of contrasting perspectives on contemporary India. But the most imaginatlvely ambitious if also analytically elusive perspective on India since 1947 shows a rapid acceleration and intensification in the long-running encounter between a civilization intricately designed with the specific purpose of perpetuating itself as a society, a community with a shared moral order, one of the world's most sophisticated assemblages of 'great' and 'little' traditions, and set against it, the imperatives of modern commercial society. This is presumed somehow to link a political order that enshrines individual rights and representation to an economic system of private property rights and market exchange - but it stands under permanent threat of being unable to reproduce itself, and is fundamentally unstable. Seen from this angle, the many civilizational strands on the Indian subcontinent have uncomfortably but inescapably been confronting modernity: a seductively wrapped and internally inconsistent mixture of instrumental rationality, utilitarianism, and respect for individual autonomy and choice. From this perspective one can focus on the question of whether a culture and its members can sustain their distinctive character once they entrust their destiny (as they must) to a modern state - - -     And yet the idea of India remains a remarkable tenacity. Like their nationalist predecessors, Indians of vastly different backgrounds and ambitins today all wish to claim it for themselves. - - -     Like those other democratic experiments inaugurated in eighteenth-century America and France, India became a democracy without really knowing how, why, or what it meant to be one. Yet the democratic idea has penetrated the Indian political imagination and has begun to corrode the authority of the social order and of a paternalist state. Democracy as a manner of seeing and acting upon the world is changing the relation of Indians to themselves. How did the idea arrive in India? And what has it done to India, and India to it? - - -     Contrary to India's nationalist myths, enamoured of immemorial 'village republics,' pre-colonial history little prepared it for modern democracy. Nor was democracy a gift of the departing British. Democracy was established after a profound historical rupture - the experience, at once humiliating and enabling, of colonialism, which made it impossible for Indians to regard their own past as a sufficient resource for facing the future and condemned them, in struggling against the subtle knots of the foreigner's Raj, to struggle also against themselves. But it also incited them to imagine new possibilities: of being a nation, of possessing their own state, and of doing so on their own terms in a world of other states. By gradually raising the edifice of a state whose sovereign powers stretched across the vast Indian landscape, the British made politics the unavoidable terrain on which Indians would have ot learn to act. In pre-colonial India, power was not embodied in the concept of a state, whether republican or absolutist. Across the subcontinent, varied economies and cultures were matched by an assortment of political arrangements. They were nothing like th static 'oriental despotism' conjured up by colonial and Marxist historians: deliberative and consultative forms of politics did exist, but there was no protracted historical struggle to install institutions of representative government, nor (despite a hardly passive rural or urban poor) did large-scale popular movements act to curb the powers of rulers. Most importantly, before the gradual British acquisition of most of India's territory no single imperium had ever ruled the whole, immense subcontinental triangle. India's social order successfully curbed and blunted the ambitions of political power, and made it extraordinarily resistant to political moulding. The basis of this resistance lay in the village, and its distinct form of community, the jati. - - -     Yet India was not simply an archipelago of villages imprisoned by the local ties of caste. The prevalence of common aesthetic and architectural styles, as well as myths and ritual motifs, attests to the presence of a larger, more cohesive power. This derived neither from a unique political authority, such as an absolutist state, nor from a monolithic, codified religion controlled by Church, but rather from the ideological mechanisms of pre-colonial India. These rested on a monopoly of literacy vested in one social group, the Brahmins. The Brahminic order in India was certainly an oppressive system of economic production, and it enforced degrading rules about purity and pollution. But its capacity to endure and retain its grip over a wide geographical area flowed from its severely selective distribution of literacy. The Brahminic pattern survived not through allying with temporary bearers of political power, nor by imposing a single belief system on the society. Rather, it cultivated a high tolerance for diverse beliefs and religious observances, withdrew from political power - the realm of Artha, or mere worldly interest - and directed its energies towards the regulation of social relationships; it made itself indispensable to the conduct of essential rituals, and it provided law for every aspect of social life. Its interpretative powers were recognized as teh ultimate sanction and authority for caste rules. By renouncing political power, the Brahminic order created a self-coercing, self-disciplining society founded on a vision of moral order. The society was easy to rule but difficult to change: a new ruler had merely to capture the symbolic seat of power and go on ruling as those before him had done. India could be defeated easily, but the society itself remained unconquered and unchanged. Politics was thus consigned to the realm of spectacle and ceremony. No concept of a state, an impersonal public authority with a continuous identity, emerged: kings represented only themselves, never enduring states. It was this arrangement of power that explains the most peculiar characteristic of India's pre-colonial history: the perpetual instability of political rule, the constant rise and fall of dynasties and empires, combined with the society's unusual fixity and cultural consistency. Its identity lay not in transient political authority but in the social order. 

© Sunil Khilnani