What Can India Offer?

I will not tackle this problem directly but instead take upone of its sub-questions: to whom is this problem important and why? I believeit is important to both Indians and Europeans but for different reasons. In thisarticle, I will spell out and reflect upon some of these reasons. 

For the first time in the last four to five hundred years,non-white and non-Christian cultures will have a significant impact on theaffairs of the humankind. Here, India will play an important role. As a result,the need to explicate what it means to be an Indian (and what the‘Indianness’ of the Indian culture consists of) will soon become the task ofthe entire intelligentsia in India. In this process, they will confront thechallenge of responding to what Europe has so far thought and written aboutIndia. A response is required because the theoretical and textual study of theIndian culture has been undertaken mostly by Europe in the last three hundredyears. What is more, it will also be a challenge because the study of India haslargely occurred within the cultural framework of Europe. 

In fulfilling this task, the Indian intelligentsia oftomorrow will have to solve a puzzle: what were the earlier generations ofIndian thinkers busy with, in the course of the last two to three thousandyears? Let me use a contrast with the European culture to exhibit the nature ofthis puzzle and its importance to the theme of this article. 

What were the Indian thinkers doing during the same period?The standard textbook story, which has schooled multiple generations includingmine, goes as follows: caste system dominates India, women are discriminatedagainst, the practice of widow-burning exists, corruption is rampant, mostpeople believe in astrology, karma and reincarnation … If these propertiescharacterize India of today and yesterday, the puzzle about what the earliergenerations of Indian thinkers were doing turns into a very painful realization:when the intellectuals of one culture, the European culture, were busychallenging and changing the world, most thinkers from another culture, theIndian in our case, were apparently busy sustaining and defending undesirableand immoral practices. Of course there is our Buddha and our Gandhi but that isapparently all we have: exactly one Buddha and exactly one Gandhi. If thisportrayal is true, the Indians have but one task - to modernize India - and theIndian culture but one goal - to become like the West as quickly as possible. 

However, what if this portrayal is false? What if thesebasically European descriptions of India are wrong? In that case, the questionsabout what India has to offer the world and what the Indian thinkers were doingbecome important to the Europeans. For the first time, their knowledge of Indiawill be subject to a kind of test that has never occurred before. Why ‘for thefirst time’? The answer is obvious: the knowledge of India was generatedprimarily when India was colonized. Subsequent to the Indian independence, Indiasuffered from poverty and backwardness. In tomorrow’s world, the Indianintellectuals will be able to speak back with a newly found confidence and theywill challenge the European descriptions of India. That is, for the first time,they will test the European knowledge of India and not just accept it as God’sown truth. Moreover, the results of this test are not of mere scientificinterest; they will also have serious social, political and economicrepercussions on the European societies. If true, the question becomes: whatkind of ‘knowledge’ about India will be tested? 

(a) Caste is an antiquated social system that arose in thedim past of India. If this is true, it has survived many challenges - theonslaught of Buddhism and the Bhakti movements, the Islamic and Britishcolonization, Indian independence, world capitalism - and might even survive‘globalization’. It follows, then, that the caste system is a very stablesocial organization. 

(b) There exists no centralized authority to enforce thecaste system across the length and breadth of India. In that case, it is anautonomous and decentralized organization. 

(c) All kinds of social andpolitical regulations, whether by the British or by the Indians, have not beenable to eradicate this system. If true, it means that the caste system is aself-reproducing social structure. 

(d) Caste system exists among the Hindus, the Sikhs, the Jains, the Christians,the Muslims… It has also existed under different environments. This means thatthis system adapts itself to the environments it finds itself in.  

(e) Because new castes have come and gone over the centuries,this system must also be dynamic. 

(f) Since caste system is present in different politicalorganizations and survives under different political regimes, it is also neutralwith respect to political ideologies. 

Even though more can be said, this is enough for us. A simpleredescription of what we think we know about the caste system tells us that itis an autonomous, decentralized, stable, adaptive, dynamic, self-reproducingsocial organization. It is also neutral with respect to political, religious andeconomic doctrines and environments. If indeed such a system ever existed, wouldit also not have been the most ideal form of social organization one could everthink of? 

How can we try to understand this odd state of affairs? Thequestion of the immorality of the caste system became immensely important afterthe British came to India. Consequently, there are two interesting possibilitiesto choose from: one, Indians did not criticize the caste system (before theBritish came to India) because Indians are immoral; two, the Europeans‘discovered’ something that simply does not exist in India, viz. the socialorganization that the caste system is supposed to be. 

The reason why I have spent time on this issue is to signal in thedirection of a problem, which has very far-reaching consequences. If what Europeknows about India resembles what it claims to know about the caste system, whatexactly does Europe know about India or her culture? Not very much, I am afraid.Precisely at a time when, to survive in a ‘globalizing’ world, knowledge ofother cultures and peoples is a necessity, it appears as though Europe knowsvery little about either of the two. 

Perhaps, the absence of knowledge is felt most acutely by theEuropeans who invest in India. They rediscover that they are not well-equippedto do business in India. They understand neither the culture, nor the role ofcultural differences in management structures and organizations. The books andarticles on "culture and management" are full only of platitudes; on top ofthat, the newest trend in anthropology tells us that the notions of"culture" and "cultural differences" are almost of no use inunderstanding people. 

In other words, I am suggesting the following: Europe’s‘knowledge’ about India will be tested during this century. What theEuropeans think they know of India tells us more about Europe than it does aboutIndia. In that case, quite obviously, the earlier generations of Indian thinkerswere not merely busy instituting and defending immoral practices. What else werethey doing then? Now, the puzzle becomes very intriguing: what were the Indianthinkers doing in the course of the last two to three thousand years? What didthey think and write about? Did they make contributions to human knowledge? Ifyes, what are they? Answering these and allied questions will become one of theprimary preoccupations of the Indian intelligentsia in the course of thetwenty-first century. This puzzle is important to the Europeans too. Let me saywhy by setting the context first. 
Let me sketch the context by raising a question: what has the world to learnfrom Europe? Here are the familiar answers: science and technology; democracyand the legal system; respect for human rights and ecological awareness;becoming modern and cosmopolitan… When such answers are given, one does notmean that the rest of the world has to learn this or that scientific theory, ora solution to this or that mathematical problem from Europe. One means somethinglike this: the rest of the world has to learn a particular way of going-aboutwith the world from the European culture. That is, one believes that this way ofgoing-about is the unique contribution of the European culture, something thatis absent in other cultures. Let us now reverse the question: what has Europe to learnfrom India? In all the thirty years I have spent in Europe and in all the thousands of books I have probably read, I have not come across a satisfactoryanswer. Most do not even raise the issue; those who do, mumble about‘learning’ things that Europe once knew but has forgotten since. How tounderstand this situation? 

The first possibility is that there is nothing to learn fromIndia. This is possible, but implausible. It is possible that, much like the‘chosen people’ that the Jews believe they are, Europe is the ‘chosen’culture from all the cultures that populate the planet. However, it isimplausible because I have not come across any explanation for this ‘Europeanmiracle’. Nevertheless, if there is nothing to learn from India, we can allsleep peacefully: the world, as we know it, will not be disturbed. This is thefirst possibility. 

Consider the second possibility now. Europe has‘something’ to learn from India but many Europeans do not yet know what.Some give the following answers: meditation, yoga, notions of Karma, Vedicastrology… These will not do: not only are there native meditative andastrological traditions in Europe, but such answers are also inadequate. It islike saying that one has to learn partial differential equations from Europe.So, let me push the question further: what is this ‘something’ Europe has tolearn from India? 

At this stage, I normally encounter silence because theredoes not appear to be any answer to give. Surely, this is strange: Europe hasbeen studying India for centuries; it has colonized her territories and people;it tells Indians what is wrong with their society and culture… And yet, noanswer is forthcoming. The Indians know what they have to learn from Europe andthey have been learning it for centuries on end. Europe, by contrast, apparentlyhas no proper answer to the question. By virtue of this, the second possibility, i.e. thatEurope has something to learn from India but does not know what, is verydisturbing. One culture, the Indian, has been learning for generations andcenturies; the other culture, the European, does not know what to learn or evenwhether there is anything to learn. And these two cultures, for the first timein so many hundred years, will meet each other on the world arena as equals andas competitors.  What will the outcome be? 

My own research, and that of many more in India and Asia, isfocused on answering the puzzle. Within the scope of this article, I cannot evenhope to tell you what the research results are. Therefore, I am forced to take arain-check. Nevertheless, let me indicate the far-reaching nature of theseresults. 

Even a limited acquaintance with the Indian or Asian culturetells us that their thinkers have also produced multiple ‘theories’ abouthuman beings, which express the way the Indian or even Asian culture looks atthe world. Yet, these theories are also contributionsto human knowledge. This knowledge is about many things: the nature of humanbeings, the nature of ethics and morality, how human beings learn, whathappiness is and how to reach it, what we could know about human beings… Inshort, this is knowledge about us; it is also about what we can know, what wemight hope for and what we should be doing. As the Indian and the Europeancultures differ from each other, so do their views about human beings. 

The European intellectuals have elaborated their stories sofar. The Indians and the Asians will do the same in the course of this century.These two sets of theories will meet on the world arena too, as equals and ascompetitors. Today, we think that the European story about human beingsconstitutes knowledge. That is because there are no competitors to this story asyet. How about tomorrow, when there will be competition in the marketplace ofideas, and Indians and Asians come up with other and different theories? 

So, by the end of this century, there will at least be twodifferent sets of stories about human beings, their societies and cultures. Onethat the West has produced and the other that India and Asia will develop. Onlyone of these can be true or both will be false. However, these are issues fortomorrow. Today, let us merely appreciate why the theme of this article is soimportant to all of us. 

S.N. Balagangadhara is Director of the Research Centre VergelijkendeCultuurwetenschap, Ghent University, Belgium and  Project Coordinator of the European Commission Asia-Linkproject DEVHAS -- Development of HumanResources And Strategies -- and this article was written for a DEVHAS project for education on the stereotypical images and culturaldifferences between Europe and South-Asia, within the European CommissionAsia-Link Programme - a programme dedicated to higher education networkingbetween Europe and Asia.