Modern India: The Anatomy of a Nation and an Idea - Essay Example

of Modern India: The Anatomy of a Nation and an Idea It is often said in passing conversation that the present is a product of the past; the idea being that the past, by virtue of being an accumulation of facts, thoughts, and deeds, effectively creates the present. Better put, the present is an everyday enactment of the spectacle that was the past. There is a certain truth there; one would not deny that the past is greatly influential over the present. Beginning in the late nineteenth century in various areas of academia, particularly in historiography, this rather intuitive assertion began to be reversed. Instead many postulated that it was the present which determined the past. The Italian thinker and historian Benedetto Croce famously quipped that “every true history is a contemporaneous one” (1989, p.14).1 The idea here was such that, despite the past’s structural influence over the present, in fact it is the present which “creates” the past. This was somewhat revolutionary in two ways: it turned around the traditional view of the past-present relationship and it had as its effect the idealization of human history. History was an idea which, like anything else, is subject to change. Change occurs in the present, thus history (and the past) is made in the present. The implication of this formulation had many effects on the concept of the nation. The nation, in traditional nineteenth century discourse, was an eternal entity of ancient provenance akin to other popular notions of that century like race, class, and culture. It was Ernest Renan who sought to discredit this approach to nationalism by claiming that “[t]he existence of a nation is an everyday plebiscite, just as the existence of the individual is a constant affirmation of life” 2007, p. 34). Speaking of his native France, where there existed the popular idea that all Frenchmen descended from the Francs, he controversially pointed out that France and “Frenchness” was the result of the centralization of power starting in the sixteenth century on up until the eve of the First World War. This same approach to the concept of the nation as a construct of people’s minds instead of as an objective and ancient entity finds a certain resonance in the case of modern India where one can find all the aspects of national-conscious building, creative-history writing, and past construction in all their subjective minutiae. India, after its 1947 independence from Britain, found itself in the awkward position of simultaneously “creating” a past which both highlighted the country’s rich cultural patrimony and which had to correspond to a present which itself was everyday changing. The case of India then yielded a dialectic whereby an ephemeral past was subjected to the caprices of the present. When a country writes its history, in Renan’s view, it does so in way that conforms to present realities. The historian’s craft then is the creation of a mythos; the past is celebrated because the present reflects it (though only because that past was written in the present). In India this truism finds an excellent exemplar in the case of Hindu nationalism, particularly that of the Hindu nationalist Party, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party). Since the advent of independence, many Hindu political leaders have sought to promote a concept of India rooted in the Hindu religion and culture for which the country is widely known. Consequently, religions which came to India through conquest and/or missionaries are viewed as “foreign.” There are over 100 million Muslims in India who can trace back their existence there for several centuries. For the Hindu nationalists, however, they are “un-Indian.” Struggles over the construction of the past are vital to members of the movement. The movement legitimizes its exclusionary rhetoric and violent actions by activating the image of a Hindu nation under siege from onslaughts of Muslims (and, to a lesser degree, Christians) throughout history. Central to Hindu nationalism is the insistence that a constructed past of Muslim aggression against Hindu women must be avenged today. Although the movement has existed in different forms for over a century, the violence associated with it has radically escalated in the last few years. (Menon 2005, p. 104) Thus the Hindu nationalists have wanted to promote an India which resists Muslim and Christian influence and which protects its women from foreigners. This sort of rhetoric sells well politically. The former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, himself a nationalist, often downplayed violence to Muslims and exaggerated crimes against Hindus. This largely conforms to what Renan asserted. In the interests of unity, a nation binds its citizens together with a common historical discourse. In a blatant act to obtain political power, Hindu nationalists have used the past as a weapon. Any questioning of their narrative has ever been met with outrage and threats. As Renan presciently wrote: Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for nationality. Indeed, historical inquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origins of all political formulations, even of those whose consequences have been altogether beneficial. Unity is always affected by means of brutality. (2007, p. 38) In India this has meant constructing a past which celebrated a Hindu identity at the expense of other narratives of cultural minorities. Though we should be careful not to over-apply Western experiences with nation construction to what is a non-Western case. That which took several centuries in Europe, occurred in the case of India in a matter of decades. In his book The Idea of India, Sunil Khilnani forwarded the idea that India had to create a national ethos relatively quickly out of the ashes of the British Raj. Though he also traced the emergence of non-national historical narratives in recent years, Sunil portrayed the early India of Nehru as Luigi Pirandello’s did his play’s actors: India was a nation in search of a country or, better put, a country in search of a nation. Sunil wrote For nationalists, 1947 marked a keypoint on a still building crescendo, a thrilling movement to a brighter future, where a settled and defined modern Indian nation, mature in its ‘emotional integration’ would come to preside over its destiny…the history of India can be seen…as the history of a state: one of the first, largest and poorest of the many created by the ebb of European Empire…The arrival of the modern state on the Indian landscape over the past century and a half, and its growth and consolidation as a stable entity after 1947, are decisive historical facts. They mark a shift from a society where authority was secured by diverse methods to one where it is located in a single, sovereign agency. (1997, pp. 2-3). Khilnani’s argument here holds relevance not just for India but also for many post-colonial states. Their status as countries is a product of their former status as colonial possessions. This varies by case but not to the extent that an exception may be found. Though India in a general sense existed for thousands of years as a cultural entity, it only came to possess features of a modern nation-state by virtue of its conquest by Great Britain. Khilnani’s analysis thus made a point visceral to our discussion here: the Modern Indian State largely found its division of political power, its system of laws, its territorial boundaries, and even its own conception of itself not in the writings of Patanjali or in the thought of the Vedas but rather in the imprint left it by the British Raj. The unity which it maintained after independence, though drawing on its rich cultural heritage, took its administrative cues from the structural integrity afforded it by the colonial government. This has particular meaning for the Hindu nationalists who believed (and still believe) “that India will be a Hindu nation, otherwise it will be no nation at all” (Menon 2005, p. 104). The State provides the political stability which creates the possibility of the nation. These Hindu nationalists sought to use the State to further their historical concept of India so as to create a nation which conformed to that very concept. In a sense then the history of India of the last half century or so has been the making of the history of India of the last 2000 years. It was Nehru who promulgated the idea of an Indian nation which did not entirely conform to the European prototype. In Europe the sense of national unity was forged over many centuries. India lacked this unity, though it did, as mentioned, inherit a reasonably rationalized political structure even if the country in 1947 was extremely poor and backwards in comparison to Western definitions of national unity. This rushed unity resulted in a modernity not completely identical with its European counterpart. As Khilnani pointed out: Out of this experience, they had to forge their own distinctively Indian modernity…Nehru wished to modernize India, to insert it into what he understood as the movement of universal history. Yet the India created by this ambition has come increasingly to stand in an ironic, deviant relationship to the trajectories of Western modernity that inspired it. The processes of modernity within India have unraveled, and it has not kept to the script. (1997, p. 8) An important part of Nehru’s program for the country was an Indian version of socialism. The country’s people and resources would be harnessed not just for economic development but also to help create and “develop” the Indian State and thus nation. He sought “to coordinate within the form of a modern state a variety of values: democracy, religious tolerance, economic development and cultural pluralism” (Khilnani 1997, pp.11-12). The problem with a modern state arises when the need for unity comes up against stated aims like democracy and cultural pluralism. In India, Hindu nationalism has long sought an imposed unity which would come at the expense of tolerance and, in some cases, democracy. Nehru sought a subjective modernity which would carve out a place for India in the world. This modernity, however, did not always bring the future which it had been shown to promise. One interesting example wherein India’s modernization has contravened its sacred (and thus constructed) past related to literacy. Modern democracy, though successfully implemented by many after 1947, was not something for which India’s past had well prepared it. Democracy assumes an involved and informed populace. Being literate is a necessary part of this. The cultural, though not political, unity which India enjoyed prior to British rule derived mainly from the Brahmin caste’s authority. The cultural power which it enjoyed “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 of 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. (Khilnani 1997, p. 19) Authority was maintained because cultural knowledge, and thus power, was protected in esoteric form by India’s ancient priestly class. This contrasts drastically with some features of post-1947, post-Nehru, and thus modern, India where “‘Arivoli Iyakkam’ (Enlightenment Movement), an adult literacy movement that seeks to bring rural women into the communicative logic of governance, [has brought] participatory development, and a broader sense of ‘empowerment’ to the countryside through the sense of written language” (Cody 2005, p. 347). The fact that today in India women (in addition to men) are asserting their voice and empowering themselves politically by learning to read and then participating democratically could not stand in more contradistinction to India’s past of strict knowledge control, male patriarchy, and rural political powerlessness. Therefore the State which has slowly been created since 1947, though influenced by the past, has shown itself to be perfectly capable of departing from it. To somewhat paraphrase Renan’s conception of the nation, in modern India “the plebiscite is still everyday being made.” To some extent, the history of India in the last fifty years has been but the stage for differing parties to vie for control of the present so as to assert a view of the past which would bring about the future that each individually desired. The present-mindedness inherent to any modernist discourse found a special expression in India. There a rich culture inherited a centralized state which then set upon the task of creating a nation. All the elements of modernity’s problems played out. The desire for democracy conflicted with the right to cultural tolerance which in turn challenged the ability of the state to provide unity. The idea of the Indian nation has been a constantly changing and innovative one. Its methods, however, have not been terribly new. In India historical narratives and nationalist discourse sought the same things they have in other countries: power and influence. Works Cited Cody, Francis. Inscribing Subjects to Citizenship: Petitions, Literary Activism, and the Performativity of Signature in Rural Tamil India. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Croce, Benedetto. The Theory and History of Historiography. Milan: Adelphi Edizioni, 1989. Khilnani, Sunil. The Idea of India. New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1997. Menon, Kalyani Devaki. “‘We Will Become Jijabai’: Historical Tales of Hindu Nationalist Women in India.” The Journal of Asian Studies 64:1 (2005): 103-126. Renan, Ernest. What is a Nation?. Le Mot et Le Reste, Marseille, 2007. Read More