This article originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement.
Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian is a civilised polemic about India; and it raises certain questions. For me, the most interesting of them is the implicit one: what need does the appearance of this book respond to, in writer and reader? This most banal of questions seems to lead to a (for me, at least) crucial discussion on culture.
Many of the facts and citations that Sen marshals towards his polemic would, indeed, be familiar to people acquainted with studies of Indian culture and history; but the moment and manner of the polemic make it unusual. It’s directed, mainly, against two views of India, views that might seem remotely connected to one another, or even adversarial. Both emphasise - even invent - an India synonymous with religion, magic, antiquity, ‘spirituality’, the irrational, the non-modern. The first of these views has a powerful and venerable history; it’s the principal Western perception of India, and that perception, even when it’s an empathetic one, begins and ends with India’s spiritual significance. With imperialism, the perception becomes a justification - to differentiate the conquered from the conqueror as being less rational, less capable of individual and independent action, less intrinsically free.
The second view that Sen’s concerned with has made a relatively recent appearance, although its hidden history in India is a long and troubled one. Sen points out that this second view, which has to do with the invention of a particular India by right-wing Hindus (represented by the BJP and ancillary political organisations like the RSS), bears a striking resemblance to the Western invention, notwithstanding the BJP’s strident and melodramatic nationalism. The BJP’s interpretation or vision of Hinduism - Hindutva - is political and emotional, but owes hardly anything to traditions of rationality.
Sen’s purpose is to remind us that the democracy and the secular inheritance we value in India today are not an accident, and neither are they merely a gift from the West; nor are they, on the other hand, something that an idealised Hindu identity needs protection from. Towards the middle of the book, Sen addresses both the Western misrepresentation and the Hindu mystification, and the point at these antithetical streams unexpectedly flow into each other: ‘The special characteristics of Western approaches to India have encouraged a disposition to focus particularly on the religious and spiritual elements in Indian culture. There has also been a tendency to emphasise the contrast between what is taken to be "Western rationality" and the cultivation of what "Westerners" would see as "irrational" in Indian intellectual traditions. While Western critics may find "anti-rationalism" defective and crude, and Indian cultural separatists may find it cogent and penetrating (and perhaps even ‘rational’ in some deeper sense), they nevertheless agree on the existence of a simple and sharp contrast between the two heritages. The issue that has to be scrutinised is whether such a bipolar contrast is at all present in that form.’
For Sen, the ‘bipolar contrast’ is a construct that’s circulated widely in the academic, political, and popular imagination, but which doesn’t bear close examination.India, says Sen, has a long, even pioneering, tradition of argumentation, scientific achievement, secular debate, free thinking, scepticism. It’s a tradition in which, for example, its democracy, its freedom struggle, its intellectual and cultural developments in the last two hundred years, and, by implication, Sen’s own trajectory from economist to public intellectual - an archetype of the rational, argumentative Indian modern - need to be placed.
Sen, of course, is not alone among Indians in espousing the secular, the rational, the ‘high’ cultural: indeed, enlightenment values and a humanist vision of the world in general, and of India in particular, have accompanied and indelibly shaped the growth and formation of the Indian middle class from the early nineteenth century onward. The humanist discourse (for the want of a better word) has been, by common consensus, the elite discourse in India; and it’s against it that, on the one hand, raw, emotive, right-wing critiques like Hindutva have been raised, and, on the other, as Sen notes, critiques such as Subaltern Studies - which traces the itinerary of the Indian peasant - whose provenances are Gramscian, and belong to the left. The political expression of this modernist, enlightened humanism is usually referred to by the catch-all term ‘Nehruvian’, although it doesn’t by any means emanate from Nehru alone; it would be as much a mistake to identify that political temper with a singe figure, despite Nehru’s personal vision of his country, as it would to reduce the Elizabethan age to Elizabeth I. For the philosophical underpinnings and the first explorations of the basis of that humanism we need to go back further to the late eighteenth century, to the polyglot scholar Raja Rammohun Roy, who, in taking issue both with Brahmin orthodoxy and Christian missionaries, ‘made in two decades’, as the historian CA Bayly has said, ‘an astonishing leap from the status of a late-Moghul intellectual to that of the first Indian liberal,’ and who ‘independently broached themes that were being simultaneously developed in Europe by Garibaldi and Saint-Simon.’
But if the discourse of modernity and of the human has been the elite discourse in India for almost two centuries, this elitism and hegemony is rather an unusual one in that it appears to have no official intellectual or existential expression, no central texts. It’s been translated into policy, statecraft, and institutional practice, into democracy, free speech, and ideas of social equality, and its most eloquent author and guarantor is the constitution; it’s observable as the context in which not only political activity, but the growth and development of literatures, the writing of histories, the creation and contestation of meanings, have taken place since the early to mid-nineteenth century. Yet, if one were to turn to look toward a body of work, or a single significant statement, for a full-blown genealogy and definition of the human in India, and, especially, its cognitive basis, we wouldn’t find a great deal. It’s fine to deconstruct or historicise that cognitive basis - what it means to be, to think and feel as, a modern and an Indian - by placing it in its social and institutional contexts, but only when we have a thorough idea of what it is, or at least more than the dim and generalised sense we have of it now.Indeed, it’s likely that we’d get a more vivid idea of the Indian modern in critiques of Indian modernity, in the works of, say, Ashis Nandy or the Subaltern Studies historians, than in its own putatively formative domain.Or we might agree that such a thing as Indian modernity, with its notions of rationality, science, authenticity, and ‘high’ culture, existed by arriving at it by a process of elimination: very large areas of Indian history in the last two centuries will simply not fit comfortably into a category such as, for instance, ‘post-colonial’.
The filmmaker Satyajit Ray, watching Kurosawa’s Rashomon for the first time in Calcutta, noted in startlement that a work or sensibility of such sophistication couldn’t be a one-off or a freak occurrence; that it must emerge from a culture ‘fully formed’. We might say the same of any Indian modern, including Ray. And yet our canonical sense of the ‘fully formed’ cultural history - compared to, say, that of European or American modernity - in which we must locate the modern Indian self and its impulses is relatively poor, notwithstanding salutary overviews undertaken recently by the likes of CA Bayly, and Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal. A somewhat odd hegemony, then - what makes Indian modernity, especially its subjective space, so elusive?
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Amartya Sen has attempted - successfully, I think - to write an erudite but accessible handbook on, and defence of, what is in effect secular Indian modernity (although, tellingly, like other Indians, Sen too isn’t wholly comfortable with the term ‘modern’), on its roots in antiquity, and its possible journey in the future. Sen’s idea of situating the modern ‘argumentative’ Indian in the lineage of traditions of science, scepticism, and rationality that go back in history - to figures like the Moghul emperor Akbar, a peerless liberal, in Sen’s eyes, and then further into antiquity, to mathematicians like Aryabhatta - bears some resemblance to the notion of the ‘early modern’ advanced by certain South Asian historians fairly recently. These historians don’t go back quite as far as Sen does, to texts like the Upanishads, but restrict themselves, on the whole, to the period between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. In the hands of a historian like Sanjay Subrahmanyam, it’s a fecund and challenging notion; it qualifies, as Sen too tries to, our assumption that modernity in India was the inadvertent gift of colonialism. For Subrahmanyam, this period in India isn’t just a medieval age defined by feudal and religious interrelationships, but a time when certain ‘early modern’ structures come into place, in institutional practice, modes of dissemination of knowledge, social mobility, the role of the individual, or subtler cultural registers like, as Subrahmanyam notes, the ‘shift in the portrayal of the empirical individual’ in the painting of the ‘Mughal school’.
The usefulness of the notion of the ‘early modern’ is indubitable, although it’s never entirely clear what the Indian ‘late modern’, or, simply, ‘modern’ is through whose filter we’re looking back, presumably, at its early foundations. The methodology seems to be a bit like Borges’s in his essay, ‘Kafka and his Precursors’, where the narrator notes wryly that it became possible, after Kafka’s appearance on the horizon, to trace a line of precursors, both notable and obscure, stretching back from him - an ironical reversal of the orthodox teleology of traditions developing and leading up to a ‘great writer’.
But there’s little doubt that the ‘early modern’ helps us to look back at history and uncover new formations in it.For me, the psychology of the modern is at least as important as, and indivisible from, its institutional and political context; and, in light of this, I can think of two key ‘early modern’ moments in addition to the ones our historians have written about.
The first has to do with the significance of domiciled natives, or, to borrow from Heaney, ‘inner émigrés’, to the Indian sense of nationality. There are two crucial figures in this regard: the first is the great 13th-century scholar, poet, and innovator in music in the Delhi Sultanate, Amir Khusrau; the second, the early 19th-century Anglo-Portuguese poet, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, who lived and died at the age of 23 in Calcutta, and whose sonnets in English to his ‘native land’, India, are still studied in schoolbooks. Khusrau’s father, who was Turkish, migrated to India from Central Asia; Khusrau patriotically called himself, by all accounts, ‘Turk-e-Hindavi’, or an ‘Indian’ Turk. Derozio, approximately six centuries later, chose to give voice to the first rumblings of Indian identity as we know it now in his sonnets and poems. Both these men are definitive instances of the journey the ‘early modern’ makes towards the ‘modern’, especially in that they prefigure what we now suspect to be true of Indian nationality: that it not only transcends race, but complicates and perhaps includes within itself the notion of ‘otherness’ and foreignness. This is why, in the last elections in India, secular Indians who might not have been admirers of Sonia Gandhi nevertheless found themselves deeply uncomfortable with the attempts to marginalise her from the political process because she’d born an Italian.
The other key ‘early modern’ moment, for me, involves a transgression - a quasi-Oedipal one - that is, everywhere, constitutive of modernity. This is the son’s breach, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of the father’s mercantile, bourgeois status, towards a daydreaming, irresponsible, and possibly artistic life, realigning and reassigning, in the process, the values of the bourgeois order. This transgression is the subject of Mann’s novels, it lies, silently, at the core of Kafka’s life, and is charted in a progression in the history of the Tagores in Bengal, from the life of the entrepreneur ‘Prince’ Dwarkanath, to that of his otherworldly but landowning son Debendranath, to, finally, that of his grandson (at first, a disappointment in the family), the poet Rabindranath.
Might the well-known turning of certain landlords from their feudal responsibilities, before and at the cusp of colonialism, towards the classical arts, especially music (Tarashankar Banerjee’s tragic story, ‘Jalsaghar’, about this turn in the life of one landowning family was later made into a film, The Music Room by Ray), be an ‘early modern’ prefiguring of that bourgeois and profoundly modern transgression? Certainly, one of the most important junctures in the story of colonialism in India, the annexation of Oudh by the British, involves a king, Wajid Ali Shah, who was seen to have abnegated his monarchical responsibilities for music and dance, and is credited with facilitating one of the most popular of semi-classical musical forms, the thumri. From the point of view of the history of colonial, nationalist, and Marxist histories, these abnegations of duty signify decadence, the waning of the Mughal order, the failure of an old social class which left itself vulnerable to either to either the new, parvenu bourgeoisie or the coloniser.From the point of view of the history of modernity, is not the lapse of the artistic landlord or king an ‘early modern’ rehearsal of a definitive moment, when the old is transgressed and transformed unrecognisably into the new?
Probably one of the principal reasons that the word ‘modern’ is problematic for Indians, that modernity remains, in South Asia, an unofficial and potentially embarrassing reality in spite of being a hegemonic and foundational one, is its filial involvement with the ‘colonial’. For many South Asian historians today, ‘colonial modernity’ is the rubric under which everything that was produced or occurred from roughly the mid-19th century onwards falls - from the great novels of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Hindu oleographs, educational policy, the scientific temper, the railways, the creation of popular culture, to nationalism. But while theorists of the ‘early modern’ and the ‘colonial modern’ have tried, often with a high degree of excellence, to describe what actually happened in South Asia in the last five hundred years, one feels that the very terms, ‘early modern’ and ‘colonial modern’, are inflected with a nostalgia for what never did happen, or what might have - an indigenous, home-grown modernity, in whose narrative the problematic moment of colonialism never occurred.Is it because of this (and not just to pursue a Borgesian irony) that the historians of the ‘early modern’ never clearly specify what its late phase is - because it was interrupted and compromised by colonialism? And is this why the status of the ‘colonial modern’ is never less than ambiguous, and it’s never accorded more than a provisional and slightly controversial acceptance: because Indians believe modernity is both theirs and not theirs, because they feel that it was authored, at least in part, elsewhere? Perhaps this is why the modern in India has been both a hegemony and an inheritance that Indians have been consistently equivocal about; why its features are obvious and also partly concealed. This is a pity, because we’ve never known any other modernity but the one we’ve had: in spite of its privileging of, and investment in, human agency, it’s true we can probably no more choose our history of modernity than we can our relations. The secret, utopian longing, in India, for another, ‘purer’ modernity possibly explains why we fail to engage completely with the implications and radical achievements of this one.
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While it’s true that Indian modernity as we know it is concomitant and congruent with colonialism, it’s also true that the construction of ‘Indianness’, or ‘being Indian’, in that period transcends, complicates, and makes fluid the fixed identity of the colonial subject. In what way, and how, did ‘being Indian’ become a point of departure from all sorts of more specific marks and occlusions towards a seemingly transparent, absolute, spontaneous human identity?
The question hasn’t been adequately answered. At what point in the nineteenth century, for instance, did a person in India reading either Tagore, or Shakespeare, or the
