Our distortions and their consequences.INDIA AND THE WEST
I.
In a letter to his mother, dated January 9, 1913, E.M. Forster
describes his experience of climbing the minaret of a mosque in
Banaras, accompanied by a train of local children. When they came
down, they asked for bakshis, or tips, "reprimanding each other for
their bad breeding as they did so." Forster reports the negotiations
thus:
To the boy who had helped me not to bump my head I gave one anna.
He said it was little, I said it was enough and he agreed. The other
boy had carried Murray and so I gave him two, but he too said it
was little.... I asked his name. He answered "Baldeo." I told him that
was my servant's name too, and he was so struck that he forgot about
the money and engaged in social talk. At the end he said, "Presence,
two annas are not much, can I have four?" "O Baldeo, two are
plenty. " "Plenty, did you say? O very well," and he went like a
dear.
Not all international encounters go as smoothly as that. What is
chiefly at work in this report is Forster's inclination, of which there
is plenty of other evidence, to like what he sees in India (except, of
course, the British). Yet the experiences that he describes and
summarizes can be interpreted and seen quite differently. Thus, in
recounting what are, at one level, rather similar experiences in
India, John King Fairbank, the great American expert on China (and
generally known to be a kind person), assesses the situation very
differently. "One never disputes a fee with them; they all salute and
take it. ... With Chinese coolies ... if you pay too much, they try for
more, if not enough, they protest vigorously." When at last Fairbank
returns to China from India, he is happy to confirm that the Chinese
"are vigorous and smiling, the greatest contrast to the lassitude and
repression of the Indians." Fairbank retains the memory of pliant
Indians as "timorous cowering creatures, too delicate to fight like
the Chinese. "
The point in question is not whether Forster's and Fairbank's
experiences of Indian docility in this type of money-making are
typical now, or were typical when they made their respective
observations. Nor am I particularly concerned with the contrast
between Chinese and Indian traits. The relevant issue here is the
disparate perceptions of essentially similar sequences of events by
two observers with different backgrounds and predispositions.
Dissimilarity of perceptions has been an important characteristic of
Western understanding of India, and several different and competing
conceptions of that large and complex culture have been influential
in the West. The diversity is of interest on its own, but its
importance is much enhanced by the impact that the Western
conceptions have on the self-perceptions of the Indians themselves.
This interrelationship is partly the result of India's colonial history,
but the influence of foreign interpretations on the self-perception of
indigenous peoples is also a general feature of contemporary
cultural interdependence. It applies with particular force to societies
that have ended up being more dependent, for historical reasons, on
ideas that flourish in the metropolis of the modern world.
The influence of self-perception can be particularly important when
a country is in the process of redefining itself. This is the case in
India now. The movement to see India more in Hindu religious terms
is a cultural correlate of the political developments that have put
India in such turmoil in recent years. The interest in cultural
understanding is thus intensified by its contemporary political
relevance. I shall argue that the diverse interpretations of India in the
West have, for a variety of reasons to be discussed, tended to work
in the same direction, and have reinforced each other in their impact
on the self-perceptions of Indians. And the overall effect of this
process has been unfortunately to undermine the more rationalist and
less religious parts of Indian intellectual traditions; and this has a
direct bearing on what we see in India today.
In his justly famous analysis of the construction of the "Orient" in the
Western imagination, Edward Said has written that "the Orient is an
idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery and
vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the
West." Said explains that his own work "deals principally, not with
a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the
internal consistency in a particularly influential Western
characterization of the Orient." I would argue, however, that unless
one chooses to focus on the evolution of a specific conceptual
tradition (as Said in effect does), "internal consistency" is precisely
what is hard to find in the variety of Western conceptions of, in this
instance, India. For there are several fundamentally contrary ideas
and images of India, and they have quite distinct roles in the Western
understanding of the country, and also in influencing the manner in
which Indians see themselves.
II.
Attempts from outside India to understand and to interpret the
country's traditions can be put into at least three distinct categories,
which I shall call the exoticist, the magisterial and the investigative.
The exoticist approach concentrates on the wondrous aspects of
India. The focus here is on what is different, what is strange in a
country that, as Hegel put it, "has existed for millennia in the
imagination of the Europeans." The magisterial approach deals with
notions of India as an imperial territory from the point of view of its
governors. This outlook assimilates a sense of superiority and
guardianhood needed to deal with a country that James Mill defined
as "that great scene of British action." This, of course, is primarily a
British phenomenon, but a great many British observers did not fall
into this category, and some non-British ones did. The investigative
approach is the most catholic of all, and covers various attempts to
understand Indian culture and tradition from outside, without looking
only for the strange and without being weighed down by the
magisterial burden.
I begin with the investigative approach. People are interested in
other cultures and different lands, and investigations across the
boundaries of country and tradition have been vigorously pursued
throughout human history. The development of human civilization
would have been very different had that not been the case. Of
course, the exact motivation for these investigations can vary;
curiosity is not the only impulse. Yet the investigations need not be
as thoroughly constrained as they are under the exoticist or
magisterial straitjackets.
In contemporary theories of history and literature, there is some
skepticism as to the possibility of any approach to learning that is
innocent of power, or unaffected by the characteristic interests of the
observer. To some extent, such skepticism is justified. The
motivation for the investigation and the nature of the observations
would indeed depend on the role and the position of the observer
vis- a-vis the object of investigation. But this conditionality does not
have the effect of making all the different observational findings
equally arbitrary. There are real lines to be drawn between
inferences dominated by rigid preconceptions and those that are not
so dominated. The process of learning can accommodate
considerable motivational variations without becoming worthless as
an epistemic enterprise.
An excellent example of investigative approaches to understanding
India can be found in Alberuni's Arabic Ta'rikh al-hind, or History
of India, written in the early eleventh century. Alberuni was born in
Central Asia in 973 A.D., and first came to India with the marauding
troops of Mahmud of Ghazni. He became very involved with India,
proceeded to master Sanskrit, studied Indian texts on mathematics,
natural sciences, literature, philosophy and religion, conversed with
as many experts as he could and also observed social conventions
and practices. His book presents a remarkable account of the
intellectual traditions and social customs of India at the time.
Alberuni's was almost certainly the most impressive of such
investigations, but there are a great many examples of serious
Arabic studies of Indian intellectual traditions around that time.
Brahmagupta's pioneering Sanskrit treatise on astronomy had been
first translated into Arabic in the eighth century (Alberuni
retranslated it three centuries later); several works on medicine,
science and philosophy had Arabic rendering by the ninth century;
and so on. It was through the Arabs, of course, that the Indian
decimal system reached Europe, as did Indian writings in
mathematics, science and literature in general.
In the concluding chapter of his book, Alberuni describes the
motivation of his work this way:
We think now that what we have related in this book will be
sufficient for anyone who wants to converse with the Hindus, and to
discuss with them questions of religion, science or literature, on the
very basis of their own civilization.
He is particularly aware of the difficulties of achieving an
understanding of a foreign land and people, and specifically warns
the reader about it:
In all manners and usages, [the Indians] differ from us to such a
degree as to frighten their children with us, with our dress, and our
ways and customs, and as to declare us to be the devil's breed, and
our doings as the very opposite of all that is good and proper. By the
bye, we must confess, in order to be just, that a similar deprecation
of foreigners not only prevails among us and the Indians, but is
common to all nations toward each other.
While Arab scholarship on India provides plentiful examples of
what I am calling the investigative approach, it is not unique in this
respect. Quite a lot of early European studies of India must be put in
this general category. A good example is the work of the Italian
Jesuit Roberto Nobili, who went to south India in the early
seventeenth century, and whose remarkable scholarship in Sanskrit
and Tamil permitted him to produce quite authoritative books on
Indian intellectual discussions, in Latin as well as in Tamil. Another
Jesuit, Father Pons from France, produced a grammar of Sanskrit in
Latin in the early eighteenth century, and also sent a collection of
Indian manuscripts to Europe. (Happily, they did not have to deal
with the Bombay customs authorities in those days.)
Still, the real eruption of European interest in India took place a bit
later, in direct response to British -- rather than Italian or French --
scholarship on India. A towering figure in this intellectual
transmission was the redoubtable William Jones, the legal scholar
and officer of the East India Company, who went to India in 1783
and by the following year had established the Asiatic Society of
Bengal, with the active patronage of Warren Hastings. In
collaboration with scholars such as Charles Wilkins and Thomas
Colebrooke, Jones and the Asiatic Society did a remarkable job in
translating a number of Indian classics -- religious documents (such
as the Bhagavadg degrees it degrees a) as well as legal treatises
(particularly, Manusmriti) and literary works (such as Kalid degrees
as degrees a's Sakuntal degrees a).
Jones's ambition was, he explained to a friend, "to know India better
than any other European ever knew it," and his own description of
his chosen fields of study included the following modest list:
... the Laws of the Hindus and the Mohamedans, Modern Politics and
Geography of Hindustan, Best Mode of Governing Bengal,
Arithmetic and Geometry, and Mixed Sciences of the Asiaticks,
Medicine, Chemistry, Surgery, and Anatomy of the Indians, Natural
Productions of India, Poetry, Rhetoric, and Morality of Asia, Music
of the Eastern Nations, Trade, Manufacture, Agriculture, and
Commerce of India.
One can find many other examples of dedicated scholarship among
British officers in the East India Company, and there can be little
doubt that the Western perceptions of India were profoundly
influenced by such investigations. Western scholarship in Indian
studies has continued at a high level right to the present time.
Although Europeans (British, French, German, Russian and others)
have been more occupied with the subcontinent than Americans
have, in recent years there has been more interest in the United
States as well, and a community of distinguished scholars with
expertise on India has clearly emerged.
III.
I turn now to the second category, the magisterial approach. The task
of ruling a foreign country does not go easily with seeing the
subjects as equal. It is quite remarkable that the early British
administrators in India, even the controversial Hastings, were as
respectful of the Indian traditions as in fact they were. The empire
was, of course, still in its infancy and was being acquired rather
gradually and tentatively (if not quite in a fit of absent-mindedness).
A good example of a magisterial approach to India is the classic
book on India written by James Mill, published in 1817, on the
strength of which he was appointed as an official of the East India
Company. Mill's History of British India played a major role in
introducing the British governors of India to a certain
characterization of the country. Mill disputed and dismissed
practically every claim ever made on behalf of Indian culture. He
concluded that it was totally primitive and rude. This diagnosis
fitted well with Mill's general position in favor of bringing a rather
barbaric nation under the benign and reformist administration of the
British empire. Consistent with his beliefs, Mill was also an
expansionist in dealing with the remaining independent states in the
subcontinent; the obvious policy to pursue, he explained, was "to
make war on those states and subdue them."
Mill chastised early British administrators (such as Jones) for
having taken "Hindus to be a people of high civilization, while they
have in reality made but a few of the earliest steps in the progress to
civilization." At the end of a comprehensive attack on all fronts, he
came to the conclusion that the Indian civilization was at par with
other inferior ones known to Mill -- "very nearly the same with that
of the Chinese, the Persian and the Arabians," and he also put in this
category, for good measure, "subordinate nations, the Japanese,
Cochin-Chinese, Siamese, Burmans and even Malays and Tibetans."
How well-informed was Mill about his subject? He wrote his book
without ever having visited India. It was also hard for him to "be
there authorially" (to use one of Clifford Geertz's concepts), and this
was not only because he had not been there personally. He knew no
Sanskrit, no Persian and no Arabic; he had practically no knowledge
of any of the modern Indian languages; and so his reading of Indian
material was most limited. Moreover, there was his inclination to
distrust anything stated by native scholars, since they appeared to
him to be liars. "Our ancestors," said Mill, "though rough, were
sincere; but under the glossing exterior of the Hindu lies a general
disposition to deceit and perfidy."
Perhaps some examples of Mill's treatment of particular claims of
achievements may be useful to illustrate the nature of his extremely
influential approach. The invention of the decimal system with place
value and a zero, now used everywhere, as well as the so-called
Arabic numerals are generally known to be Indian developments.
Alberuni had mentioned them in his eleventh-century book on India,
and many European as well as Arab scholars had written on the
subject. But Mill dismisses the Indian claim to priority altogether,
on the ground that "the invention of numerical characters must have
been very ancient" and "whether the signs used by the Hindus are so
peculiar as to render it probable that they invented them, or whether
it is still more probable that they borrowed them, are questions
which, for the purpose of ascertaining their progress in civilization,
are not worth resolving." He proceeds then to explain that the
Arabic numerals "are really hieroglyphics, " and that the claim on
behalf of the Indians and the Arabs reflects the confounding of "the
origins of ciphers or numerical characters" with "that of
hieroglyphic writing." Mill's rather elementary error lies in not
knowing what exactly a decimal or place-value system is (or does),
but his ill-informed smugness cannot be understood except in terms
of his implicit unwillingness to believe that a really sophisticated
invention could have been managed by such a primitive people.
Another interesting example is Mill's reaction to Indian astronomy
and its prescient argument for a heliocentric view of the planetary
system, with a rotating Earth and a model of gravitational attraction.
Such a view was proposed by Aryabhata, who was born in 476
A.D., and investigated by, among others, Varahamihira and
Brahmagupta in the sixth and seventh centuries. Their works were
well-known in the Arab world. Jones had been told about these
works in India, and he reported what he learned. But Mill expresses
total astonishment at Jones's gullibility. "As evidence of the fond
credulity with which the state of society among the Hindus was for a
time regarded, I ought to mention the statement of Sir W. Jones, who
gravely, and with an air of belief, informs us, that he had heard of a
philosopher `whose work was said to contain a system of the
universe, founded on the principle of attraction and the central
position of the sun.'" After ridiculing the absurdity of this attribution
and commenting on the "pretensions and interests" of Jones's Indian
informants, Mill concludes that it was "extremely natural that Sir
William Jones, whose pundits had become acquainted with the ideas
of European philosophers respecting the system of the universe,
should hear from them that those ideas were the contained in their
own books."
For the purpose of comparison, it is useful to examine Alberuni' s
eleventh-century discussion of the same issue, involving
heliocentrism and the role of gravitational attraction in Indian
science:
Brahmagupta says in another place of the same book: "The followers
of Aryabhata maintain that the Earth is moving and heaven resting.
People have tried to refute them by saying that, if such were the
case, stones and trees would fall from the earth." But Brahmagupta
does not agree with them, and says that that would not necessarily
follow from their theory, apparently because he thought that all
heavy things are attracted toward the center of the earth.
Alberuni himself proceeded to dispute this heliocentric view, raised
a technical question about one of Brahmagupta's mathematical
calculations, referred to a different book of his own arguing against
heliocentrism and pointed out that the relativist character of
movements makes this issue less central than one might first think:
"the rotation of the Earth does in no way impair the value of
astronomy, as all appearances of an astronomic character can quite
as well be explained according to this theory as to the other." Here,
as elsewhere, while arguing against an opponent's views, Alberuni
tries to present them as clearly as possible. The contrast with Mill
could not be sharper.
There are plenty of other examples of "magisterial" readings of India
in Mill's history. This had some practical importance, since the book
was extremely influential in British administration and widely
praised. It was described by Macaulay as "on the whole the greatest
historical work which has appeared in our language since that of
Gibbon. " Macaulay's own approach and inclinations fitted in well
with Mill' s:
I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic.... I am quite ready
to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists
themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that
a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole
native literature of India and Arabia.
This view of the poverty of Indian intellectual traditions played a
major part in educational reform in British India, as was readily
seen from the "Minute on Indian Education," written in 1835 by
Macaulay himself. (The remark quoted above occurs in that
"Minute.") The priorities in Indian education were determined,
henceforth, by a different emphasis: by the need, as Macaulay
argued, for a class of English-educated Indians who could "be
interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern. "
That policy has indeed had many achievements, but a shared
knowledge of Indian classics is not among them. And leaving the
classics only for specialists has some rather serious consequences
for Indian education. For one thing, it makes the population more
vulnerable to fraudulent and sectarian claims about Indian traditions.
The thoroughly ahistorical and intolerant readings of the nature of
"real India" by the newly powerful Hindu extremists, who cite
nonexistent records and annals, and confound epic stories with
scriptural texts, have been facilitated to some extent by the neglect of
serious classical education in modern India.
The impact of the magisterial view of India was not confined only to
Britain and India. Modern documents in the same tradition have been
influential elsewhere, including in the United States. In a series of
long conversations with 181 American intellectuals on India and
China, conducted by Harold Isaacs in 1958, it was found that the
two most widely read literary sources on India were Rudyard
Kipling and Katherine Mayo. Of these, Kipling's writings would be
more readily recognized as having something of the "magisterial"
approach to them. Mayo was the author of the massively derogatory
Mother India, which has been described by Lloyd Rudolph in this
way:
First published in 1927, Mother India was written in the context of
official and unofficial British efforts to generate support in America
for British rule in India. It added contemporary and lurid detail to
the image of Hindu India as irredeemably and hopelessly
impoverished, degraded, depraved and corrupt. Mayo's Mother
India echoed not only the view of men like Alexander Duff, Charles
Grant and John Stuart Mill but also those of Theodore Roosevelt,
who glorified in bearing the white man's burden in Asia and
celebrated the accomplishments of imperialism.
Mahatma Gandhi, while describing Mayo's book as "a drain
inspector' s report," added that every Indian should read it, and
seemed to imply, as Ashis Nandy notes, that it is possible "to put her
criticism to internal use" (as an overstern drain inspector's report
certainly may be). Gandhi himself was severely attacked in Mayo's
book, though given his campaign against caste and untouchability, he
might have welcomed even her exaggerations in the depiction of
caste inequities. But American reliance on thoroughly distorted
products of the "magisterial" approach must surely be detrimental to
international understanding. Even though the influence of magisterial
readings on American images of India has been somewhat countered
in recent years by the political interest in Gandhi's life and ideas,
and by the writings of Erik Erikson and John Kenneth Galbraith, it is
still hard to break through the barrier of distorted preconceptions
about India (as Nathan and Sulochana Glazer have discussed in their
recent book, Conflicting Images).
IV.
I turn now to the "exoticist" approach to India. Interest in India has
often been stimulated by the observation of exotic ideas and views
there. Arrian's and Strabo's accounts of Alexander the Great's
spirited conversation with various sages, including the naked
gymnosophists of northwest India, may or may not be authentic, but
ancient Greek literature is full of uncommon happenings and thoughts
attributed to India.
Megasthenes' Indika, describing India of the early third century b.c.,
can claim to be the first outsider's book on India, and it certainly did
excite much Greek interest, as can be seen from plentiful references
to it, for example, in the writings of Diodorus, Strabo and Arrian.
Megasthenes had ample opportunity to observe India; as envoy of
Seleucus Nicator to the court of Chandragupta Maurya, he spent
nearly a decade, between 302 and 291 b.c., in Pataliputra (the site of
modern Patna), the capital city of the Mauryan empire. But his
superlatively admiring book is also so full of accounts of fantastic
objects and achievements in India that it is hard to be sure what is
imagined and what is observed.
There are various other accounts of exotic Indian travels by ancient
Greeks. The biography of Apollonius of Tiyana by Flavius
Philostratus in the third century A.D. is a good example. Apollonius
was most keen on a departure from what he saw around him. In his
search for the out of the ordinary, he was, we understand, richly
rewarded in India: "I have seen men living upon the earth and not
upon it; defended without walls, having nothing and yet possessing
all things."
From Alexander listening to the gymnosophists' lectures to
contemporary devotees hearing the sermons of Maharishi Mahesh
Yogi and Shri Rajneesh, there is a crowded lineage. Perhaps the
most important example of intellectual exoticism related to India can
be seen in the European philosophical discussions in the eighteenth
and early nineteenth century, among the Romantics in particular. The
leaders of the Romantic movement, the Schlegel brothers, Schelling
and others, were profoundly influenced by rather magnified readings
of Indian culture.
From Herder, the critic of the rationalism of European
Enlightenment, we get the magnificent news that "the Hindus are the
gentlest branch of humanity," and that "moderation and calm, a soft
feeling and a silent depth of the soul characterize their work and
their pleasure, their morals and mythology, their arts." Frederich
Schlegel not only pioneered studies of Indo-European linguistics
(later pursued particularly by Max Muller), but also brought India
fully into his critique of the contemporary West. While in the West
"man himself has almost become a machine" and "cannot sink any
deeper," Schlegel recommended learning from the Orient, especially
India. He also guaranteed that "the Persian and German languages
and cultures, as well as the Greek and the old Roman, may all be
traced back to the Indian." To this list, Schopenhauer added the New
Testament, which, in contrast to the Old, "must somehow be of
Indian origin: this is attested by its completely Indian ethics, which
transforms morals into asceticism, its pessimism and its avatar (i.e.,
the person of Christ)."
Not surprisingly, many of the early enthusiasts were soon
disappointed in not finding in Indian thought what they had
themselves put there, and many of them went into a phase of denial
and criticism. Some of the stalwarts, Schlegel in particular, recanted
vigorously. Others, including Hegel, outlined fairly negative views
of Indian traditions, along with presenting loud denials of the
pre-eminence of Indian culture -- a claim that was of distinctly
European origin. When Coleridge asked, "What are these potentates
of inmost Ind?" he was really asking a question about Europe, not
India.
In addition to veridical weakness, the exoticist approach to India has
an inescapable fragility that can be seen again and again. A
wonderful thing is imagined about India and sent into a high orbit,
and then it is brought crashing down. All this need not be such a
tragedy when the act of launching is done by (or with the
cooperation of) the putative star. Not many wept, for example, for
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi when the Beatles stopped lionizing him and
left suddenly. When asked by the Maharishi why they were leaving,
John Lennon had to say: "You are the cosmic one. You ought to
know."
But it is a different matter altogether when the boom and the bust are
thrust upon the victim. One of the most discouraging episodes in
literary reception occurred early in this century, when Ezra Pound,
W.B. Yeats and others led the chorus of adoration of the lyrical
spirituality of Rabindranath Tagore's poetry, which was soon
followed by thorough disregard or firm denunciation. Tagore was a
Bengali poet of tremendous creativity and range (though his poetry
does not translate easily, not even the spiritual poems that were so
applauded). He was also a great storyteller, novelist and essayist,
and he remains a dominant literary figure in Bangladesh and India.
The versatile and innovative writer whom Bengalis know well is
not the sermonizing spiritual guru invented in London; nor did he fit
any better the caricature of "Stupendranath Begorr" and his family
that we find later in Shaw' s "A Glimpse of the Domesticity of
Franklyn Barnabas."
V.
The different approaches have shaped the understanding of Indian
intellectual traditions in the West in quite different ways. The
exoticist and magisterial approaches have bemused and befuddled
that understanding, even as they have drawn attention to India in the
West. The exoticist outbursts bring India into many people's
awareness in big tides of bewildered attention, but then they ebb,
leaving not much behind. The tides, though, can be hard work, while
they last. I remember feeling rather sad for the dejected racist I saw
some years ago near the Aldwych station in London, viewing with
disgust a thousand posters pasted everywhere carrying pictures of
the obese -- and the holy -- physique of Guru Maharajji, then a great
rage in London. Our dedicated racist was busy writing diligently
under each of the pictures: "fat wog." In a short while that particular
wog would have gone, but I don't doubt that the "disgusted of
Aldwych" may have to chalk up "lean wog" under other pictures
now.
It might be thought that since the exoticist approaches give credit
where it may not be due, and the magisterial approaches withhold
credit where it may well be due, the two might neutralize each other.
But in fact they have very asymmetrical effects. Magisterial
criticisms tend to blast the rationalist and humanist aspects of India
with greatest force (this is as true of Mill as of Mayo), whereas
exoticist admirations tend to build up the mystical and extrarational
aspects with particular care (this has been so from Apollonius of
Tyana to the Hare Krishna activists of today). The result of the two
taken together is to bias forcefully the understanding of Indian
culture away from its rationalist aspects. 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. Mysticism and
exoticism, by contrast, have a more hallowed position in that
understanding.
Western perceptions and characterizations of India have
considerable influence on the self-perceptions of Indians
themselves. This is certainly connected with India's colonial past,
and with its continued deference to what is valued in the West. But
the relationship is not just a matter of docile submission. It
sometimes includes vigorous resistance and protest. Still, even the
negative responses make the offending Western conceptions deeply
influential in a dialectical way.
The European exoticists' interpretation and praise of India found a
large welcoming audience in colonial India, and to some extent it
even had a political role in the nationalist movements for
independence from Britain. The ecstatic appreciations were quoted
again and again, and the negative remarks by the same authors
(Herder, Schlegel, Goethe and others) were frequently enough
systematically overlooked. In his Discovery of India, Jawaharlal
Nehru comments on this phenomenon:
There is a tendency on the part of Indian writers, to which I have
also partly succumbed, to give selected extracts and quotations from
the writings of European scholars in praise of old Indian literature
and philosophy. It would be equally easy, indeed much easier, to
give other extracts giving an exactly opposite viewpoint.
In the process of accepting the exoticist praise, the Indian
interpretation of the past has tended to move in the direction of the
objects of exoticist praise, focusing more on the mystical and the
anti-rationalist. That process was fed also by negative critiques of
Indian culture, coming particularly from magisterial views. In
responding to those critiques (this was important for Indian
nationalism), it was too easy to cite appreciation from other
Europeans, and this gave the exoticist championing of the specialties
of the East further prominence.
All this has helped to undermine an adequately pluralist
understanding of the nature of Indian intellectual traditions within
India itself. There is no single Indian tradition. It is a question of
balance. While India has inherited from its past a vast religious
literature, a wealth of mystical poetry, grand speculation on
transcendental issues and so on, there is also a huge and often
pioneering literature, stretching over two-and-a-half millennia, on
mathematics, logic, epistemology, astronomy, physiology,
linguistics, phonetics, economics, political science and psychology,
among other subjects concerned with the here and now.
Indeed, even on religious subjects, the only world religion that is
firmly agnostic, that is, Buddhism, happens to be of Indian origin;
and the atheistic schools of C degrees arv degrees aka and Lok
degrees ayata have generated extensive arguments that have been
seriously studied by Indian religious scholars themselves. Thus the
fourteenth- century book Sarvadar 1/2sansamgraha (Collection of
All Philosophies) by M degrees adhava degrees Ac degrees arya
(himself a good Vaishnavite Hindu) devotes its first chapter to a
serious presentation of the arguments of the atheistic schools.
What I am disputing is not the importance of mysticism and religious
initiatives in India, which are certainly plentifully there, but the
overlooking of all the other intellectual activities that are also
abundantly present in that thoroughly plural culture. The picture of
India overwhelmed by religious preoccupations is a portrait of
grave sobriety, but if it were said that India is a country of fun and
games in which chess was invented, badminton originated, polo
emerged and the ancient K degrees amas degrees utra told people
how to have joy in sex, that too would not be an erroneous account,
though it would be an unlikely account to be given today.
How does the influence that Western understandings of India have
on the self-perceptions of Indians affect the nature of the politics of
contemporary India? It would, of course, be absurd to think of Indian
politics in primarily exogenous terms, but there are some linkages.
First, the nature of exoticist reading has typically had a strongly
"Hindu" character. This was present, in a way, even in William
Jones' s pioneering investigations, except that he was to some extent
redressing the relative neglect of Sanskrit classics in the preceding
Muslim regimes (even though the version of the Upanishads that
Jones first read was the Persian translation prepared by the Moghul
prince Dara Shikoh, the eldest son of Emperor Shah Jahan, who built
the Taj Mahal). The European Romantics tended to identify India
with variants of Hindu religious thought. Their impact on Indian
perception has been to strengthen that alleged identity of India with
Hinduism, making it a little easier for the Hindu political activists of
today to argue for a specifically Hindu view of India.
Second, as I suggested earlier, the magisterial dismissals (by Mill,
Macaulay and others) of the value of the Sanskrit classics
contributed to something of a dissociation of modern Indian
education from its classical roots. One of the interesting features of
the contemporary revival of Hindu extremism is its utterly
ahistorical nature, which permits reinventions of the past to suit the
demands of political expediency. The confounding of epic stories
with scriptural texts in magnifying the role of Ayodhya in Hindu
religious thought is one example. Modern reconstructions of the past
would have to be more restrained if there had been more
widespread knowledge of the real classical traditions of India.
Third, the newly popular Hindu politics of recent years makes much
use of obscurantism, linked to the increasing force of anti-rationalist
thought in general. The strengthening of the mystical parts of the
Indian traditions at the cost of the rationalist parts owes something,
again, to the impact of exoticist praise and magisterial denunciation.
Georges Ifrah, the historian of mathematics, quotes a medieval Arab
poet from Baghdad called al-Sabhadi, who said that there were
"three things on which the Indian nation prided itself: its method of
reckoning, the game of chess and the book titled Kalila wa Dimna [a
collection of legends and fables]." This is not altogether a different
list from Voltaire's cataloging of the important things to come from
India: "our numbers, our backgammon, our chess, our first principles
of geometry and the fables which have become our own." These
selections would not fit the common Western image of India today.
Nor would they fit the way many Indians perceive themselves and
their intellectual past. The selective alienation of India from a very
substantial part of its own past has been nourished by the
asymmetric relation between India and the West. And it is the
rationalist part of India's tradition that has been most affected by this
alienation.
By Amartya Sen Amartya Sen is Lamont University Professor at
Harvard University and the author of Inequality Re-examined
(Harvard University Press).
New Republic is the property of New Republic and may not be copied without the express written permission of New Republic
Sen, Amartya, India and the West.., Vol. 208, New Republic, 06-07-1993, pp 27.