The shifting of the ideas of India territorially and historically examined in the text shakes the complacency about our idea of the nation, the false notion of Indian culture as a monolithic entity. The idea of India as determined by economics, language, culture at various junctures in the history of what we now call India is discussed, in this brief conversation, counterintuitively as Gayatri Spivak prefers all discussions to be.

The idea of India has evolved at different junctures in history and is mostly territorial and shifting. Even the name Aryavarta is not one well defined space, it keeps shifting. It is as diverse as diverse can be. It is not until the 1920s when according to Romila Thapar the idea of India that had been amorphous, saw the beginnings of an ‘ idea’ emerging as what we now call India.

Both of them are skeptical of ‘ideas’. Spivak teaches literature and speaks in metaphors. She feels the idea is like a lid which too often solidifies the entire diversity of thought systems into an unidentifiable mass and one cannot separate the each unique India after it has become the Idea of India. Edward Said had called it an Orientalist discovery of India which the progressive elites identified with.

Thapar thinks most people identify with the culture at the top when they say “I am an Indian”: “I see this as a heritage of the colonial view of India and Indian culture: the two nation theory underlined the perspectives on culture and theory as devolving from the Hindu and Muslim communities in a strictly religious sense. Looking beyond the elite was thought to be unnecessary. “: the Muslim India and the Hindu India. Thapar stresses that during the time of the national movement we did not endorse the Hindu Rashtra idea or claim that Hindu has primacy as a citizen.

The India after independence was conceived as a society that would be reasonably equal: every citizen enjoying the same privileges. Our economic plan that focused on state industrialization, employment, rural development to create an equal society, pay no attention to caste and religion, the plurality of which were determinants of Indian culture, observes Thapar. Spivak gives a nuanced description of how she as a young expatriate in the US found India. India to the diasporics was an unreal version of what it really was. “At that point in time (1987) it had already become important for us not to acknowledge the diasporic image of India as India as a minority in the US, sometimes even a white- identified, good affirmative action minority.” She goes on to point out how in the democratic India the largest sector of the electorate, the landless illiterates have no idea of India at all. The idea of India as non- idea.

Thapar, when she pins the idea of India as a coherent India in the 1920s, is not imagining a single idea but “the opening out of possible ways of looking at these ideas, why they happen, what the consequences were “. The idea of India conceived by the anti-colonial national movement, the idea of India ( un)conceived by the diasporics, and the idea of India that is determined by cultural differences, religion and language. Attending to the interlinkages between economics, culture and religion is what they both seem concerned about. Spivak quotes Marx,” the content of the 19th century revolutions will come from the poetry of the future”.

They discuss the matter of Indian culture as conceived and practiced by the Indian middle class abroad and Thapar says” much of what one might call cultural or religious attitudes of the diaspora tend to have a very direct influence on the middle class here”. Spivak thinks there is a certain kind of unexamined unity coming in among the radical diaspora and she believes this solidarity is extremely frightening. Spivak thinks that India is a multi everything place which is ignored by Indians abroad. Spivak’s take on religion is both poetic and philosophic: one must make it a practice not to think of one’s own identity as the national identity.

Spivak’s take on religion is both poetic and philosophic: one must make it a practice not to think of one’s own identity as the national identity. “I don’t even know whether one should think ‘India’ but if one does, one should think about Indians who do not resemble one at all” and mix it up as a Hindu girl seeking blessings of a Muslim saint as an unconscious gesture or accepting ‘Assalamualaikum’ as an Indian way of greeting just as Namaste is, so that somehow we begin to think not only of our own identity as the Indian identity.

The two nation theory actually evolved from an elite perspective so Spivak points to the cultural differentiation that is more significant than class and caste. That the obsession with economic development did not pay much attention to language and religion, which is the cultural articulation of the nation, has apparently done much damage.

Question of economic growth is not merely Garibi Hatao but also social inclusion. The discussion elaborates on social inclusion, linking it to education, how it helps in questioning rather than it just being learning and knowledge. The focus now is not just on what the idea of India is but who has an idea of India. The discussion dwells on regional language and English: whether reading books in English might help in critical thinking. As in a conversation one often re-forms one’s thinking- Thapar reflects “it’s not true of every local language perhaps, there are people that are more analytical who are writing but I think that input from a different kind of intellectual tradition is always a very worthwhile input.”

Complex questions regarding language and its status are asked in the text. The content of Education depends on who is controlling the content and who is financing education especially in a so-called secular state, two things, the content of education and civil laws are very important factors in the creation of India, the identity of the Indian and the kind of society one looks forward to. Regarding the uniform civil code which Thapar suggests in the question “Isn’t it time that we removed all individual laws of caste and religion?” Spivak asks who are the’ we’ which emphasizes the relevance of political interests in the defining of uniform civil code.

Suggesting detranscendentalizing so that one conceives of religiosity as working even at the grassroots level, she points out, this can happen when religion is not mobilized politically. She relates an incident where she was eating Kurban meat with Bangladeshi Muslim women; they were poor and did not often get to eat meat. They were kind enough to worry about her as an upper caste Hindu eating meat. She says, “They are protecting my religion.” She explains that sometimes the self righteous missionary zeal in not teaching Christian scriptures to the natives, because they won’t understand the value of being taught the right way, is not actually access to secular education. She says that a certain kind of class mobility actually puts the lid on religious cultures. The emphasis is on who the decision makers, the ‘we’, are. As long as you had a reasonably secular state it was possible to have the content of Education not controlled by the strength and importance of local religious organizations.

A very pertinent observation regarding development that Spivak makes is “Development is insertion into the circuit of capital, without any kind of training as to how to manage it. Forget the training to use capital for social ends: opening of Swayam Nirbhar bank accounts without the knowledge of how to open and manage them.” This is where ideas of development and language within development become significant.

Thapar’s anxiety about cultures turning too inward looking and turning into one language communities without access to other cultures is answered by Spivak’s observation that the aboriginals that she has been associated with since 1986 were multilinguals, oblivious of the fact that they were. The Mundas and Oraons were also using each other’s language. She says this dialectical continuity; this multi-linguality on the surface is like the ecology of forests. Linguists are now acknowledging that those unwritten languages which we want to preserve are completely dialectically continuous, very multi lingual. Thapar worries about the absence of a comprehensive perception, thinking in totalities of economic growth, religion, education, language, law. She feels these interlinkages, fundamental to a society are nonexistent in the present. Whereas Spivak feels that success will come in other ways without the progressive bourgeois ideas of building societies.

Though this book was published in a bold move by the Seagull publishers in 2024, this conversation happened in 2017, emphasizing the visionary muscle of the text.

(Professor Zahira Rahman taught literature for 25 years, occasionally writes poetry, does translations and paints in watercolours and oil. She holds a PhD in Theatre Education.)

Courtesy: https://theaidem.com

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As a political creation, present-day India dates from 1947 when the subcontinent became a single political entity for the first time in its history. Earlier, it had been regionally ruled under different regional powers. The British occupation divided it into British India and the Maharaja-ruled states. And finally the Partition divided it into India and Pakistan.

 The Congress party that then came to power had been the first political formation to demand independence from British rule and to build a countrywide movement under Gandhi to fight for it. Allegiance to the movement and active participation in it spread across region and religion, class, mass, language and gender and its inclusiveness gave the movement its unique character. Gandhi was the architect of this first-ever national consciousness and national unity, and it was Nehru’s accomplishment, as leader of India for its first seventeen years of independence, to take this consciousness forward, make it an everyday experience for Indians, and become the meaning of modern India. During Nehru’s twenty-six years of participation in the national movement – ten of those years spent in different jails – the country had come to know him better, and he had come to know Indians better than any political figure apart from Gandhi.

A fight for freedom is always accompanied by the frame of mind that inspires it. It identifies its goals in the course of the struggle and makes clear its stand on issues. The new government’s avowed commitment to equality, pluralism, and secularism came out of this experience of a unity above differences, and a shared Indian identity. After the bloodshed and devastation of Partition, Nehru’s immediate and overwhelming priority was communal harmony. His personal pledge to safeguard religious freedom left no room for doubt. Speaking to a public gathering in 1951 he said: “If anyone raises his hand against another in the name of religion, I shall fight him till the last breath of my life, whether from inside the government or outside.” The makers of the Constitution, led by Ambedkar, had given this declaration constitutional authority. For Ambedkar, liberty and equality were not gifts to be granted, but the birthright of every human being, and ensuring these had been his lifelong crusade. The Hindu Right and the Muslim Right had taken no part in the unifying experience of the national movement and pluralism was foreign to their thinking. Both based identity and nationality on religion, making the partition of India inevitable. The Muslim claim to this unbreakable bond fell apart when East Pakistan broke free to become Bangladesh. In India succeeding general elections rejected the Hindu Right until 2014.

The conditions in which the Idea of India was carried out by Nehru’s governments, and the immensity of the enterprise that lifted a subcontinent out of political and economic slavery and set it on the road to recovery and modernisation, were daunting, and that this massive endeavour took place in an open society with no sacrifice of individual freedom, made it the first of its kind in history. India had been drained of resources and impoverished by two centuries of plunder and exploitation under British occupation. An economy designed for British profit had halted indigenous growth. The 1930’s had seen a series of famines and during the Second World War when Indian grain was diverted to British armies in war zones, the Bengal famine had killed nearly three million Indians. By 1947, fifty percent of nearly 400 million Indians lived in miserable poverty.

It was a moment when the world’s critical, skeptical, and judgemental eyes were watching India. Assessments of India’s development by informed observers are of value because they were contemporary, and they are of interest because they tell us the opposite of what Indian critics are now saying, which is that nothing happened under Nehru and that the first twenty years of independence were wasted years. India watchers at the time took a different view. Here are two opinions. One is from Percival Griffiths, a retired British civil servant who had had no confidence in India’s abilities. In 1957 he wrote that foodgrain production since independence had been “spectacular” and that India had succeeded in doing what he and other observers had thought was impossible. Economist Barbara Ward who followed India’s development closely wrote in 1961 of the growth of the private sector, from Tata’s steel plant in Jamshedpur producing half a million tons of steel a year to the villager selling his first maund of rice in the market. She wrote: “Never has private enterprise expanded or diversified so quickly as in the last decade. Its investment in all sectors, including agriculture, nearly doubled between the First and Second Plans…” A later Indian assessment by Pulapri Balakrishnan concluded that from zero percent growth between 1900 and 1947, the first fifteen years of independence, until the Chinese attack in 1962, saw the economy grow to 4%, bringing India in line with the successful economies of the time, and ahead of China, Japan and the UK.

India-watchers of the Nehru period noted from their individual national perspectives the cooperation of government and people, the mood of shared adventure that inspired a surge of national effort, and that the prime mover in this enterprise was the Prime Minister. In his detailed assessment of the successes and failures of the first two Plans, Michael Brecher, Nehru’s biographer in Nehru’s lifetime, wrote, “Indeed he is the heart and soul and mind of India’s heroic struggle to raise the living standards of its … people.” How India fared under Nehru was seen as a striving against gigantic odds, in an open society with no curtailment of rights and freedoms. At Nehru’s death this view was movingly summed up in the tributes paid to him worldwide. I am quoting two. Adlai Stevenson, American statesman, wrote: “He (Nehru) was one of God’s great creations in our time. His monument is his nation and his dream of freedom and of ever-expanding well-being for all men.” In India, a young member of Parliament, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, mourned Nehru’s passing in these words in the Lok Sabha: “…a dream has remained half-fulfilled, a song has become silent…like Ram, Nehru was the orchestrator of the impossible and the inconceivable…he too was not afraid of compromise but would never compromise under duress…the leader has gone but the followers remain. The sun has set, yet by the shadow of stars we must find our way.”

The ultimate tribute to Nehru’s India was paid by one of the 20^th century’s leading scientists, J.B.S. Haldane of Britain, when he emigrated with his scientist wife to India in 1957 and took Indian citizenship. He did this not only because of Nehru’s commitment to train young minds in science, but because in India, he said: “One has the absolute impression of being in a highly civilised community.” He said he could not say this of some cities in Europe, and most cities in America.

Nehru’s legacy is now up against an Idea of India defined as Hindutva which is the reverse of the inclusiveness India has stood for, both as a civilisation and as a nation. The Hindu Right which took no part in the national movement for freedom and found itself better served by Britain’s division of Indians on religious lines, now divides Indians into Hindus and Others. Hindutva’s first defining political act, making public what it stood for, had been the assassination of Gandhi in 1948. Gandhi had long been targeted as Hindutva’s chief enemy for his espousal of all religions and his blasphemous mantra: Ishvar-Allah tere naam. Hindutva’s campaign against Nehru is now manifest in the elimination of Nehru from history and the takeover of the Nehru Memorial Museum (along with all key institutions). Those now in charge are putting their Hindutva stamp on it.

The curious aspect of the agenda to Hinduise India and convert it into a Hindu rashtra is that this proposition has never been straightforwardly put before the public. It has not found mention in a manifesto or in election speeches, as is usual in a democracy. Nor has a referendum been put before the country to say Yes or No to it, to find out whether Indians agree to this enormous foundational change. The agenda has, however, been made clear through the war that Hindutva is waging through its Nazi-style stormtroopers against those whom it calls Others, and official attacks on all Indians who do not toe its line.

The choice today between one Idea of India and another is, in fact, a choice between fiction and reality. We are living in a situation where centuries of recorded history never happened, where all knowledge and scientific invention stems from the Vedas, and Indian identity is exclusively Hindu, going back to a glorious bygone era when the country was religiously, ethnically, culturally and racially pure, with no outside influences to soil its Hindu purity. Is it possible that fantasy can replace fact? Of course It can, and we have seen it happen in the pursuit of power, as in Germany under the Nazis. We can no longer say it can’t happen here. What we are now seeing of state-sponsored mob rule, of summary arrests and imprisonments, and the shutdown of democratic processes, may well make the choice between two Ideas of India a choice between democracy and autocracy, and in essence, a choice between civilisation and barbarism.

As the world once saluted Nehru’s absolute commitment to humane and inclusive government, it may now have to look to New Zealand’s young Prime Minister for the same civilised leadership.

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum

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