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In the recently published book Speaking of History, a conversation between historian Romila Thapar and Namit Arora, the writer and social critic who also practises public history, the participants touch upon many interesting matters of cultural and social history that provoke further conversations.
Since a large part of the book revolves around India’s cultural history and the debates around it, I would like to primarily take up the question of culture.
To begin with, Thapar describes how the new idea of culture incorporates social “patterns of life,” while, conversely, society is defined by the “pattern of culture”. The equation between society, life and culture is such that one seems to feed the meaning of the other.
I want to open up this question by reading The Discovery of India, where Jawaharlal Nehru pauses to pay attention to “the problem of human relationships” and mentions the ancient world of China and India as countries that “developed patterns of social behaviour” that offered a sense of “poise to the individual”. Nehru wonders if this poise resists historical time and is “opposed to progressive change”. Yet, Nehru believes that a certain balance between poise and progress, between science and wisdom, is desirable.
Narratives of cultural decline
Scholars who keep on harping about Nehru’s penchant for science and rationalisation alone invariably miss, or avoid mentioning, his emphasis on continuity and synthesis. By doing so, some scholars create binaries between science and culture that fundamentally imagine societies as laboratories of thinking where any sign of culture is seen as a threat to progress. The point is that the Hindu right accords a fake scientific quality to traditional knowledge systems, and these scholars pounce upon it with an equally misplaced counter, supposedly explaining true science. They are not aware of an important intellectual caution: Never make a mistake on top of a mistake.
The real argument, however, is that science cannot monopolise forms of knowledge that involve human life. The birth of a scientific world and neurosis has taken place together. Nehru had a deep inkling of it, or else why would he write: “Life advances in many fields and yet it loses its grip; it becomes more artificial and slowly ebbs away.” The meaning of human life is not possible to articulate within the constraints of positivist knowledge. There must be room for the unconscious that grapples with modern forms of violence.
Nehru writes in The Discovery: “There is something lacking in all this progress, which can neither produce harmony between nations nor within the spirit of man. Perhaps more synthesis and a little humility towards the wisdom of the past, which, after all, is the accumulated experience of the human race, would help us to gain a new perspective and greater harmony.” The point being made is: without a thread of cultural sensibility across time, we are lost in the sea of time. You don’t achieve historical perspective by denying cultural experience. Culture and its experience are not to be understood as something always ethically acceptable. It can be stifling, obnoxious, othering and stagnant. Of course, Nehru emphasised that the only approach to culture needs to be a critical one, and that one must not accept tradition “merely because it is tradition”. The only way to be dynamic is to be critical. It can include rejection in some cases, for instance, the caste system, which Nehru calls a “tyranny”.
Mao’s Cultural Revolution was an antithesis of this idea, where every remnant of culture had to be smashed in order to create a new society. It was a fascist project with communist pretensions. In contrast, Nehru’s keen historical sensibility reiterates that the “spirit of India” springs from “a common outlook on life”, and he finds it equally stamped in the case of China, in “an old-fashioned mandarin or a Communist who has apparently broken with the past.”
The authors of Speaking of History persuasively reiterate the point that the medieval conflict between Hindus and Muslims can’t be read through a modern, nationalist prism. On the one hand, it will be wrong to sentimentalise the conflict politically because the modern idea of sovereignty did not exist in precolonial times. The combination of religion and nation-state is a modern idea that doesn’t go past the 16th century. Also, many kinds of “Muslims” invaded India, from the Arabs in the eighth century, to the Turks, the Afghans and the Turko-Mongols, who were later given the name Mughals. Timur Lang had also invaded Persia. Apart from the fact that the Rajputs fought alongside the Mughals and there were Muslims who fought on the Hindu side, for instance, Thapar mentions the Suri rulers who were part of Rana Pratap’s army and died in the Battle of Haldighati.
The issue of cultural and intellectual “decay” runs through The Discovery. In the section, ‘Babar and Akbar: The Process of Indianisation’, Nehru writes: “A foreign conquest, with all its evils, has one advantage: it widens the mental horizon of the people and compels them to look out of their shells. They realise that the world is a much bigger and more variegated place than they had imagined.”
I bring this up because Nehru’s narrative of cultural and intellectual decay vis-à-vis a superior technology of power provides a dangerous reason, a quasi-justification, for conquest. The success of all grand empires, including those in the modern world, involves technological prowess which cannot be granted political justification by any narrative of decay.
From Gibbon to Christopher Caudwell, theoreticians of decay tend to justify the arrival of the new regime of power by providing a narrative of decay that afflicted the older regime. The idea of “decline and fall” in Gibbon, irrespective of the reasons he furnishes for the collapse of the Roman Empire, conjoins a certain narrative of inevitability with historical outcomes that are about big, technological power shifts. Alfred Koreber, for instance, blamed India’s inability to “reconstitute” itself beginning with the sixth century, which slowly led to its decline. Caudwell – and with him Nehru – has ideas of progress and human freedom in mind. If Caudwell analysed the perils of capitalism, Nehru observed the lack of cultural vitality in India’s feudal system, spiritual wooliness, and lack of rationality during both the Islamic and the British conquest.
The problem here is that the crude empirical fact of military defeat (with added reasons like vibrant mercantile systems) is understood retrospectively in cultural and moral terms. To critically read older cultures and civilisations, particularly through narratives of decline and decay, is to smuggle in a linear idea of modern history that connects to ideas of technological and ideological progress. This creates a kind of Hegelian reading of history (often going under the name of “philosophy of history”) where thinkers and historians in modern times judge the past with a sense of “rational” superiority. Nehru is alluding to this reading of history when he writes in The Discovery: “A civilisation decays much more from inner failure than from an external attack. It may fail because in a sense it has worked itself out and has nothing more to offer in a changing world…”
The barbarism of the 20th century seems not to have shocked historians and thinkers who still fantasise about the cult of reason and progress. They blame the ills of the modern world to “irrational” elements in culture and thinking, thus inventing an easy binary that secures the prestige of reason even as the record of liberal democracies and communist regimes has been as dismal as that of theocracies and fascism. It is way more meaningful to presume that history has no purpose or direction; its changes are accidental and decisive.
The values of the French Revolution – liberty, equality and fraternity – that have inspired the world of oppressed and marginalised people certainly gave ethical meaning to the 20th century. But even these ideas have often been implemented coercively. They have also had to deal with political complications in multi-religious societies where the singularity of universal values gets confronted by radical diversity. In recent times, the political question that has been raised globally is: Who has the right to speak for whom? There is a huge rift between the “internal” and the “external” that can’t be ignored. The political discourse of difference is not rhetorical, but real.
Arora, in Speaking of History, speaking of devadasis, mentions their granting sexual favours to the temple priests and patrons. Arora wonders about “the quality of their lives”. He further writes, “I often think that the freedom and autonomy of devadasis, as a group, have been much exaggerated by later thinkers keen to minimise the pathologies of the institution.”
The exploitation of devadasis within a religious and caste structure is well documented. Leaving aside the debate on exaggeration, can we impose a modern understanding of freedom, autonomy and quality of life on precolonial, pre-modern human beings? There is a presentist argument working here. Any measure of what we understand as freedom and autonomy that the devadasis may have enjoyed can only be understood within the frames of reference available to them. The structures of power and socio-cultural norms that existed in premodern times are different from what exists in ours. Also, cultural mores of desire and pleasure of the past can’t be objectively judged by modern standards. To assume we can judge their condition better than perhaps they did is a modernist belief and it exceeds the limits of evaluative reason.
The issue of presentism
Arora is aware of the presentist problem, as he put it earlier in the book, that genetic analysis of the past is “overturning modern assumptions projected onto prehistoric societies.” In this case, he feels scientific advancement helps overcome limitations to modern projections of knowledge. We need to be alert to those projections that will not be sorted by scientific knowledge of the past. Genetic analysis of the past is archaeological. Human societies are not solely defined or understood by archaeology, hence the need to be careful about making modernist presumptions.
While distinguishing between Shankara’s Advaita and Buddhist Madhyamika, Arora writes, the former “was a major regression in philosophical sophistication.” Ambedkar, in his highly polemical essay, Riddles in Hinduism, found Shankara’s imagining an all-pervading “Brahma”, and yet holding on to the hierarchical caste society, “ridiculous”. In a speech on Buddhism at Colombo in 1950, Ambedkar however said, “I do not agree with the suggestion made by many people in India that Buddhism was destroyed by the dialectics of Shankaracharya. This is contrary to the facts, as Buddhism existed for many centuries after his death. In my opinion, Shankaracharya himself was a Buddhist. His Guru too was Buddhist. Of course, Buddhism declined in India because of the rise of Vaishnavism and Saivism”.
Ambedkar seems to agree with the “Brahmin rivals” of Shankara that Arora mentions, who called him a “crypto-Buddhist”. If Advaita has the problem of reducing, or negating, sensuous reality and its plural forms into a non-dualistic monism, the Madhyamika dissolves reality into emptiness, employing a more radical negation. The debate between absolute being and absolute nothingness is a rich one and to treat one school as less sophisticated is subjective. Both schools encourage an ascetic mode of life and argue how to escape suffering monastically. Arora goes on to make a cryptic comparison: “It seems to me analogous to sliding back from Wittgenstein to Kant.” It is hazardous to compare two modern philosophers with two premodern schools of religious thought as their categories are based on radically different perceptions of reality and life.
My overall issue is that Arora’s presentist arguments take frequent leaps in his expectation and disappointment regarding Indian (or Hindu) society’s “decline in the secular, liberal, rational or egalitarian modes of life” from the late first millennium, which is the early medieval period.
This is the reason I started this enquiry with a critical note on the Hegelian mode of defining a philosophy of history. The moment a modernist narrative of decline of a premodern era is put in place, it is inevitably supported by uncritically bringing in categories like secular, liberal and egalitarian to make a comparative judgement. Even another term Arora uses, “sex-positive”, cannot be used to assess the erotic or sexual culture of premodern India because “sex-positive” clearly emerged out of a modern, secular school of psychoanalysis against Christian sexual taboos.
Such views hoist modern values into the past in an ahistorical manner. In fact, Nehru indulges in the same problem in The Discovery by calling the Indus Valley Civilisation “secular”, and even asserting that in ancient India “the line between religious and secular knowledge was not strictly drawn.” The non-religious, even a certain rationalist streak in philosophical thought in ancient and medieval India, cannot be termed secular and rational in the modern sense. These ideas were being imagined and circulated within a certain idea of time and cosmology. For the same reason, Akbar and Ashoka can’t be said to have had “secular” tendencies or outlook, just because they promoted ideas of tolerance between belief systems, and syncretism.
This is the problem of anachronism, which distorts historical reality. Ironically, the privilege of knowledge and power comes across most definably when modern thinkers and historians indulge in an anachronistic study of the past with tools that belong to the present. An immanent critique of the past has to use the terms of reference of the past for a meaningful, historicist critique.
A little further on, Arora asks about Brahmin men, “Did all their knowledge, privilege and access to power and resources produce worthy counterparts to thinkers like Galileo, Gutenberg, da Vinci, William Harvey, Erasmus and Voltaire – or even Alberuni, Alhazen, Ibn Sina, Averroes and Ibn Khaldun – anywhere in India?” Limited to Brahmins, the question is rhetorical, but since the counter-examples are from other civilisations, the question can slip into a larger point whether it may be suggested that there was something intellectually missing in Indian civilisation as a whole (comprising both Hindus and Muslims).
This criticism does not take into account the historical situation in medieval India, which was more involved in sorting out issues of Islamic domination and forging a syncretic culture. Intellectual breakthroughs within a feudal social structure were probably difficult. We had Dara Shikoh and Kabir from two radically different social statuses. There were, of course, exceptions like Abhinavagupta early on in the medieval period. India, or even China, cannot be accused of missing the industrial revolution and the Protestant reformation that produced the West’s great thinkers in science and political thought.
Just to be sure, I am not saying we can’t critically judge or comment on past societies at all. Of course, we can. For instance, to critique the caste system from Alberuni’s account about the hierarchical norms of Hindu society is absolutely valid. There can be no ethno-religious gatekeeping that bars “outsiders” and their critical gaze from commenting on any society. Alberuni’s account has done us a historical favour, telling us how hierarchical rigidity and the Brahmins’ pedagogical arrogance associated with the caste structure were thriving in the 11th century.
It is equally true that our critical understanding of the caste system comes from our knowledge of modern values. The same values can also judge Alberuni’s obsessions and sense of superiority regarding Islam. But beyond this, we must be mindful of our epistemic limits to read the problems of the caste structure or Alberuni’s biases, imposing our modernist expectations on it. We can only use that knowledge against existing notions and practices of caste. My point is that the terms of critique cannot come from modernist values that did not exist then. Romila Thapar has made her reservations in the book about some of these issues, and cautioned us from making quick and sweeping conclusions.
Since the past cannot defend itself or argue back to the modernist expert on history, it takes humility to seek knowledge of past societies and human beings not accessible to us. Premodern people did not live in the fantasies of a linear, progressive time of history. It is highly erroneous to expect such a fallacy in them and reprimand them for lacking it. Why should a western, modern standard of society and thinking be forced upon all civilisations? Isn’t that as colonial as religious nationalism in India (as it is argued) being a product of colonial knowledge? Isn’t the liberal camp making the same mistake by borrowing western/colonial modes of evaluation that it accuses the religious right of doing?
Speaking of History is an engaging book that provokes disciplinary questions, even as it has enough material for students and general readers to consider and reflect on India’s diverse histories. The conversation in the book is large and open, covering a broad range of issues, and to its credit, differences haven’t been edited out.
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee’s most recent book is Gandhi: The End of Non-Violence.
Speaking of History: Conversations about India’s Past and Present, Romila Thapar and Namit Arora, Penguin India.
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