Dissecting The Idea Of India
On decolonizing history in order to understand the present better.
The lingua franca of the world today, English, arrived in India in 17th century as the language of the traders from Britain. But after the East Indian Company solidified its presence and established colonial rule, the language too colonized our minds. By 1830s, the Indian middle class, most notably in Kolkata, wanted to learn it because it could get them a government job and so private tutors and learning centers mushroomed. It has been almost a century but nothing much seems to have changed. This is important because our languages are not just about communicating with one another but how we communicate actively shapes our culture. The Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o in his Decolonizing the Mind (1986) wrote, “Language carries culture, and culture carries […] the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world”.
In Discovery of India (1946), Jawahar Lal Nehru pondered, “It was not her wide spaces that eluded me, or even her diversity, but some depth of soul which I could not fathom, though I had occasional and tantalizing glimpses of it. She was like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously. All of these existed in our conscious or subconscious selves, though we may not have been aware of them, and they had gone to build up the complex and mysterious personality of India. That sphinx-like face with its elusive and sometimes mocking smile was to be seen throughout the length and breadth of the land. Though outwardly there was diversity and infinite variety among our people, everywhere there was that tremendous impress of oneness, which had held all of us together for ages past, whatever political fate or misfortune had befallen us. The unity of India was no longer merely an intellectual conception for me: it was an emotional experience which overpowered me.”
But if the story of India is one of layers upon layers that assimilated every change that came upon this land, then how did it not translate into overwriting or a complete loss of older layers? How have all these layers held together despite the multiple instances of foreign rule? Turn a few more pages of the book and Nehru brings forth the Nasadiya Sukta from the Rig Veda which speculates about the origins of the existence and concludes that it is perhaps beyond human intellectual comprehension. He also quotes Mahatma Gandhi on how Indians have known the denial of God but not the Truth. The modern day India, unlike the other great civilizations of the world such as the Greek, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Mayan, and the Chinese, seems to have retained with its origins in form of mass practice of Hinduism as well as co-existence of religions like Buddhism.
So, what has been going on here and what is this essence of India that eluded the first Prime Minister of India just as it eludes us even today? The first step towards understanding that is in re-evaluating the layers that make the modern India for what they are rather than what we might have been led to believe. An undeniably persistent and important influence, then, is the British colonialism. The India that was created throughout this experience—what was it all about and how much of it do we need to discard or carry forward?
While Nehru explored much of India’s multi-religious, spiritual, and intellectual traditions in Discovery of India, he also wrote of why we “must break with much of her past and not allow it to dominate the present”. His Idea of India was, then, one predicated on modern European ideals of secularism, science, and democracy. As much as he fought for Indian independence, his anglicization reflected an unconsciously internalized colonialism as well. Perhaps, that is why, in recent years, especially with the BJP and Prime Minister Modi at helm, Bharat has somehow wanted to emerge too. With the ruling government’s push for Yoga or everything Hindu, public displays of faith such as the PM visiting the holiest Hindu sites in Varanasi, and an increasingly polarized public discourse have brought forth the fractures that came with abandoning Bharat at the altar of India.
Which means, it’s time to hazard a definition again—what is India and what is Bharat? Anurag Shukla, 31, is a former journalist. Currently, he is a PhD scholar researching discourse and imaginaries of technology in education at IIM-Ahmedabad and believes that to define the land as either India or Bharat makes it a politically contested question. “Within this definition itself lie questions like which communities or religions are to be included or excluded, who are the oppressors and who are the historically oppressed, and whose knowledge, pasts, or identities should be privileged over others,” he explains.
However, India or Bharat needn’t be this hard to define either. Because Ruchir Sharma, 33, a historian turned international civil servant and public policy expert, asserts that the country already had a national identity when the masses were being mobilized for the independence movement. Works of Indian historians like R.C Mazumdar, K.S Lal, and K.A Nilakanta Sastri were important in this context, offering the intellectual and academic basis for a national liberation movement rooted in the rich traditions of Indian political philosophy. But following the Indian independence and adoption of constitution, the civilizational identity established in prior decades was abandoned for the purpose of building a nation from scratch.
It is at this point that the Nehruvian Idea of India, as we understand it today, came to dominate policy and discourse. “It then became an idealized fantasy about what India should be, not what India actually is,” Sharma says. He draws parallels with the Italian unification in the 19th Century as well as the Prime Minister at the time, Massimo d’Azeglio, who is believed to have said, “Italy has been made, now it remains to make Italians.”
In order to make Indians out of the citizens of a newly freed country, not only was a particular Idea of India championed but certain Indologies were also given primacy over others. The German Indologists, for instance, treated India as a blank canvas to establish an Aryan civilization past for their nation, more so in the World Wars era. Historians Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee have laid threadbare the detriment that the German historians of a Protestant background brought to Indian historiography in their book, Nay Science (2014). Their ‘secularism’ or the political application of the concept, says Sharma, was not state atheism but rather a reaction against Judaism and Catholicism, which were seen by Protestant reformers as backward, regressive, and incompatible with a modern State. These Indologists, then, sought to strip away the spirituality and religiosity of India because indigenous faith, knowledge, and educational systems existing in parallel with the colonial administration did not sit well with their own racial, colonial, and nationalistic mission.
At the same time, many of the Orientalist and exoticized accounts of India were written by those who were on the payroll of the East India Company itself. These accounts were meant to be instructive manuals for incoming British officials or visitors. In fact, a book popular with this audience was the History of British India (1818) by James Mill was written without the author even setting his foot in the country or speaking any Indian language. The book, says Shukla, was a blind criticism of Hinduism and discussed the civilizing mission of the British. The idea, he explains, was to cut Indians off from accessing from their own culture and forcing upon a British perspective instead.
An instance of how British narratives and actions came to sully Indian imaginations is to look at how the Banyans and Peepal trees which were sacred to the Hindus and Buddhists were often used for public hangings. According to some accounts, more than 250 rebels were hung from a single Banyan tree in 1860 in Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly. The associations with these trees, especially Peepal, remain sullied to date with movies and popular culture perpetrating the connection between ghosts and these trees.
This kind of economic, cultural, and historical colonialism led to a kind of cognitive dissonance amongst prominent Indian personalities too. Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the Bengali renaissance figure, according to V. Mahadevan and S.K Krishnamurthi’s book on him, maintained two houses in Kolkata. In one of these houses, everything was Western and Roy would be the only Indian element. In the other, everything would be Indian and Roy would be the only Western one. Modernity in India, then, did not emerge organically as with other countries but was always an outcome of the colonial experience, hence Janus-faced. Given that the popular opinion at the time was shaped by reformers like Roy, it is crucial to undertake the process of decolonization to tackle with the Indian “colonial consciousness” to dis-entangle true reform from a colonial idea of reform when it comes to all things Indian or Bharat.
“Much of existing descriptions of Indian society and culture are Western cultural descriptions of the experience of an alien culture, and we have continued using these descriptions for ourselves,” Shukla quotes from S.N Balagangadhara’s What Does It Mean To Be Indian (2021). “This colonial consciousness structures everything; the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world”, he adds. The French West Indian psychiatrist and intellectual, Frantz Fanon, who wrote of decolonization as a violent process, explained that colonialism also compromised the psyche of the colonized and made them “stunted” by a “deeply implanted sense of degradation and inferiority”.
“1857 (the mutiny by Indian soldiers) showed them what they were doing to degrade and demoralize the natives was not enough to break their spirit of resistance,” says Sharma. In addition to that, the Lucknow Residency, Black Hole of Kolkata, and the Siege of Kanpur too horrified people back in Britain because it “showed that Indians were capable of resistance and inflicting pain against the colonizers”. The lesson that the British took from these was that they should never allow a repeat of that.
“Everything that we know about the modern Indian state came within five years of that such as the Indian Penal Code (1860), Indian Code of Criminal Procedure (1861), Indian Councils Act (1861) which established the Indian Police Service on military lines, the organization of the judiciary, and formalization of the education system which was focused on creating a class that was compliant and submissive”, Sharma explains. These tools of statecraft that continue to exist today were designed to prevent any kind of native assertion or rebellion. Which is why, Sharma believes that our current systems of police and judiciary too are colonial in nature insofar as they are focused on maintaining law and order rather than the delivery of justice and constitutional rights.
This colonial heavy-handedness that was institutionalized throughout multiple organs of the Indian State was what led to Amitabh Bachchan’s famous Angry Young Man trope in Bollywood movies. The Indian masses in early to mid-70s immediately took to the honest and good hero of his movies who was frustrated with the corrupt and apathetic institutions because they saw themselves in him. In fact, it is for this reason that the post-Independence India saw protest movements such as the Navnirman Andolan (‘Refoundation Movement’) by Morarji Desai and Sampoorna Kranti (‘Total Revolution’) by Jayaprakash Narayan in 1974. These movements were not merely about changing the government or the MPs but trying to root out the colonial mentality that was still at helm in India. That all of this was followed by the Emergency imposed by the then Indian PM, Indira Gandhi, didn’t help the cause either.
However, one may have hoped that the liberalization of the Indian economy in 1991 would finally usher in the much-needed reforms but once again, it wasn’t so. “We were forced to reform our economy, so we did,” says Sharma, “but nobody forced us to reform our politics”. Meanwhile, other post-socialist countries like Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and more underwent constitutional, political and economic reforms simultaneously.
To be sure, the process of decolonization doesn’t require us to completely tear apart this layer of British influence upon Indian psyche. Instead, the idea is to rediscover more indigenous influences and create a space for understanding and acceptance of them. “Some of our modern sages like Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo tried to do that by involving the cultural richness of our past, along with the need to reconcile it with the modern realities of rationality and science,” says Shukla.
The Western societies, Sharma remarks, present the interaction of science and religion as a conflict or a binary. “We don’t deal with binaries; in ancient India the creators and custodians of rational and scientific schools of thought were often the same people as those who were the creators and custodians of religion, morality, and philosophy,” he adds. Indeed, to take an example, the system of calculating Muhurta, or an elected time to conduct a ritual ceremony, was traditionally a domain of both the priest as well as the astronomer.
At this point in the debate, the fears of saffronisation crop up, especially considering the inclinations of the current ruling party. Both Shukla and Sharma point out how Indian historiography has already been rewritten for revisionist political ends since independence, and attempts to rectify this are not an attempt at rewriting but a restoration of the definitive history eked out by Indian historians during the freedom struggle. They also assert that Indira Gandhi and former education minister Arjun Singh made politically motivated appointments to the government and educational institutions, favoring those of a Marxist dispensation or even those who were members of CPI. Their accusations of saffronisation, then, in many cases are professional rivalries rather than speaking truth to power, says Sharma. “We should instead be aiming for Sanskritization”, he adds, explaining that movements of cultural assimilation and civic nationalism have been seen around the world and are necessary to cultivate a shared identity in a sovereign country.
Shukla, on the other hand, feels “synthesizing the past is not saffronisation and similarly, critiquing some of its deviant elements is not fracturing our culture”. In fact, he points out that many of Indian academics who support Pan-Africanism and Pan-Slavism are against saffronisation, which exhibits ideological inconsistency. Omitting discussions on the historicity of Bharat while discussing the post-colonial ‘Idea of India’ has had a similar effect as in Pakistan where the government had to invent the subject of Pakistan Studies in order to erase the land’s pre-Islamic past to build a national identity. The fractures resulting from such an artifice have showed up in both the countries time and again, albeit in different ways.
In both of these countries, the ruling elite sought to maintain harmony by using a top-down approach of achieving a negative peace instead of a bottoms-up flow which might have been painful in the short term but would have ultimately achieve positive peace. Instead of aiming for presence of justice, they settled for absence of conflict. The masses, instead of being empowered and trusted with the truth, were coerced into submission with half-truths and lies. Sharma points out that smaller countries like Bhutan, which only adopted its constitution in 2008, take enthusiastic steps to educate their citizens about their rights and make sure they understand it to their benefit. “Even countries like Sri Lanka are more decolonized than India,” he says, explaining how the country was able to de-feudalize itself by adopting a brand-new constitution in 1978 and modernize its politics to suit its post-colonial challenges, rather than being constrained by its British-supervised constitution and institutions of 1947 like India still is today.
In order for the modern India to synthesize Bharat to move along the process of its decolonization, it needs to foster an indigenous cultural anthropology. “We need to read our texts for an insider’s perspective,” Shukla says, “because right now most of the interpretations are from the outsider’s perspective”. Even the works of Indian academics tend to follow Western methods, which makes them just as alien as a British or a German Indologist. “The texts should be read from the Hermeneutics (the method or theory of interpretation in academia) of respect and understanding, not from that of problematizing them,” he says. Re-evaluation, then, cannot come without a re-discovery of India.
The essay had inadvertently I think mixed up Morarji Desai with Bhartiya Jan Sangh. That portion seems to have been deleted? Is it true?