Is India’s Rejection Of Western Approach To Rationality Behind Its Social Evils?

The question of whether there is a crucial need for stirring a socio-cultural, attitudinal and ideational transformation on a mass-scale preceding (or at least simultaneously with) the launch of a nation-wide project for rapid all-round development has for long remained virtually suspended in most of the received analyses.

While a few scholars have noted an anomalous feature of Indian democratic experiment wherein ‘a political revolution preceded a social one’, its deep ramifications typically receive inadequate scholarly attention. In this backdrop, my book (The Indian Metamorphosis: Essays on its Enlightenment, Education and Society. Palgrave Macmillan) attempts, inter alias, at filling up the gap in existing approaches to explaining India’s baffling identity marked by a conspicuous coexistence of ‘shine’ and ‘shame’.

India’s persistent socio-cultural-political evils and their recent escalation, even amid periods of decent economic growth are attributable, in a large measure, to its resolute escape from the core ideational and attitudinal influences of western Enlightenment that had historically served as a bed-rock of modern scientific/technological progress and economic flourishing amidst thickening liberal democratic framework.

As India could neither wholeheartedly reject, nor could it sincerely embrace, the core insights, wisdoms and messages of western Enlightenment, its postcolonial project of juxtaposing western technology/science with a tradition-bound, particularistic, and paternalistic mindset has landed it in profound complexities, dilemmas, and contradictions that make for its protracted state of ‘metamorphosis’. Unlike the west, India hardly ever witnessed an organic process of socio-cultural, industrial and political revolutions in an absence of universal schooling with appropriate curricula.               

As argued in the book, immediately on Independence India could, or indeed should, have embarked on a prioritised bunch of initiatives geared to inculcating, on a country-wide scale, an unwavering admiration for universal power of reason, rationality, secular and scientific outlook, which could help weaken an encompassing dependence on blind religious faith, fate and related irrational superstitions and parochial prejudices and particularistic affinities.

The Colonial Legacy of legislations as a route to social reforms (e.g. abolition of sati and child-marriage, legalisation of widow-remarriage) should have precluded an urgency for diffusion (via education) of reason-centric attitudes/values among masses. Therefore, individual efforts of ‘Renaissance’ intelligentsias in secularising masses’ minds got easily reduced to ‘a battle of elite against the popular culture’.

As shown by Susan Bayly, India’s leading thinkers could scarcely transcend visualising ‘a synthesis of Western and indigenous Brahmanical values’ in new mode of life. By evading the core tenets of western Enlightenment, Indian mainstream thinking left no room for momentous ‘creative destruction’. In Mahatma Gandhi’s vision freedom from British rule meant a clear break from both English political thought and principles of economic progress, with Swaraj organising social and political life so as to keep intact ‘the genius of our [the Indian] civilization’.

While in western history the agency of objective reasoning and reasoned rationality played an active role in depleting pre-existing hold of blind religious faiths and associated emotions, sentiments and vanities, the Gandhian blueprint of nation-building envisaged a stable marriage between reason and religion/religious belief.

Despite discrete nationalistic modernisations, modifications or innovations in such diverse areas as language, literature, arts, family and role of women, India’s overriding (political) thinking decidedly downplayed the necessity for mass ideational modernisation based on centrality of reason, rationality, humanism, and secularism. As M.S. Gore observed, of the three major aspects of liberal thought, namely social equality, representative government, and rationality, Indian social reformers emphasised the first two, while ‘[r]ationality was perceived somewhat less clearly as a value’.

This book portrays Nehru’s distinct antipathy towards appropriate/effective public action meant squarely for shaping people’s attitude and ideational milieu (e.g. reforming educational content and its universalisation); Nehru was rather bent on being accommodative of people’s tradition-bound never-questioned affinities including their otherworldliness, fatalism and related unreasoned parochial emotions and sentiments, although this stance does not tally well with what he exactly he wrote in his erudite essays and reflections, especially before independence.

Indeed Gunnar Myrdal did note an ostensibly careless stance of Indian intelligentsia and political leadership on this issue: “The desirability of changing attitudes, though accepted at a very general level, is usually played down in public debate. Least of all does discussion take the form of demands for specific policy measures aimed directly at changing attitudes. Attitudinal changes are glossed over even in the formulation of educational policies,” he said. 

This book examines plausible reasons for Indian leadership’s stubborn antipathy, unlike in west, towards the crucial need for ideational and attitudinal modernisation and secularisation as a lasting antidote to potential religious conflicts and socio-cultural and political strife, conflicts and chaos. The first is an obstinate unwillingness of India’s political leadership in launching a frontal attack on religion-centred outlook and worldviews, as it would have wounded national pride and egoistic sentiments, which were heavily utilised by the mainstream strategy of mass mobilisation under the independence movement.

Relatedly, the colonial legacy of virtual insulation between tiny educated classes and common masses contributed enormously to the persistence of religion-centred attitudes, worldview and prejudices across society. Moreover, the role of Nehruvian domineering perception, namely, large-scale industrialisation along with modern science and technology would automatically do the job of modernising and secularising people’s minds and mentalities, can hardly be overemphasised.

Even seeds of communalism and religious animosity were thought by Nehru to be uprooted by ‘economic factor’ alone. But many of these Nehruvian perceptions have been belied by plentiful evidence of a tremendous resilience of religious rituals/beliefs even at the height of modern material affluence, commodities, and consumption together with the latest technological know-how.

Mainstream political thinking has persistently missed that in the absence of a direct ideational attack on ancient mindset/outlook, modern technology or machines per se would not be enough to conquer pre-modern parochialism.  

As its grave fallout, independent India’s momentous beginning laid a foundation for India’s anomalous prolonged path-dependence (till date). Ironically, Nehru was aware that ‘the belief in a supernatural agency which ordains everything has led to certain irresponsibility on the social plane, and emotion and sentimentality have taken the place of reasoned thought and inquiry’.

This ideationally mongrel modernity sowed fathomless contradictions quite early into post-Independence India. An exaltation of the dynamic role of western science and technology goes hand in hand with strong political compulsion clinging to a populist glorification of unscientific religious rituals. While the Gandhian precept that ‘social reforms should be brought about by a change of heart, not by compulsion and violence’ continued its sway, there was hardly any programme/policy for changing the heart of people.

A similarly dilemmatic character of Indian mainstream thinking happens to find its lasting (or increasing) reflection in laws and legislations affording discriminatory protections to socially – not economically -- ‘depressed’ people, since this calls for placing perennially unkempt and irrational caste division on a firmer, more official and perhaps ever more durable footing.

In protracted dense debates during the decades prior to independence over the caste question, the central attention has always been on the ‘upliftment’ of Harijan castes, but barely on ‘annihilation’ of caste itself. As an incisive treatise on Indian castes concludes, ‘even though the state’s moves to uplift so-called Dalits have been anything but revolutionary in their effects, the debates which these official schemes have engendered have done much to keep awareness of caste in public consciousness since Independence’.

Likewise, Indian leadership chose a form of secularism in which a religiously sensitive state has to remain equi-cognizant to all major religions of the land. Little wonder, its implementation has been encountering many latent communal forces, giving ultimately a long lease of life to ravages of communalism.  

(The author is Rajiv Gandhi Chair Professor in Contemporary Studies at University of Allahabad, Prayagraj. Views expresses are personal)