India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha
After Nehru’s death the efforts to extinguish English were renewed. Despite pleas from the southern states, on 26 January 1965 Hindi became the sole official language of inter-provincial communication. As we have seen, this provoked protests so intense and furious that the order was with drawn within a fortnight. Thus English continued as the language of the central government, the superior courts and higher education.
Over the years English has confirmed, consolidated and deepened its position as the language of the pan-Indian elite. The language of the colonizers has, in independent India, become the language of power and prestige, the language of individual as well as social advancement. As the historian Sarvepalli Gopal observes, ‘that knowledge of English is the passport for employment at higher levels in all fields, is the unavoidable avenue to status and wealth and is mandatory to all those planning to migrate abroad, has meant a tremendous enthusiasm since independence to study it’. But, as Gopal also writes, English ‘may be described as the only non-regional language in India. It is a link language in a more than administrative sense, in that it counters blinkered provincialism.’37
Those, like Nehru and Rajaji, who sought to retain English, sensed that it might help consolidate national unity and further scientific advance. That it has done, but largely unanticipated has been its role in fuelling economic growth. For behind the spectacular rise of the software industry lies the proficiency of Indian engineers in English.
V
If India is roughly 50 per cent democratic, it is approximately 80 per cent united. Some parts of Kashmir and the north-east are under the control of insurgents seeking political independence. Some forested districts in central India are in the grip of Maoist revolutionaries. However, these areas, large enough in themselves, constitute considerably less than a quarter of the total land mass claimed by the Indian nation.
Over four-fifths of India, the elected government enjoys a legitimacy of power and authority. Throughout this territory the citizens of India are free to live, study, take employment and invest in businesses.
The economic integration of India is a consequence of its political integration. They act in a mutually reinforcing loop. The greater the movement of goods and capital and people across India, the greater the sense that this is, after all, one country. In the first decades of Independence it was the public sector that did most to further this sense of unity. In plants such as the great steel mill in Bhilai, Andhras laboured and lived alongside Punjabis and Gujaratis, fostering appreciation of other tongues, customs and cuisine, while underlining the fact that they were all part of the same nation. As the anthropologist Jonathan Parry remarks, in the Nehruvian imagination ‘Bhilai and its steel plant were seen as bearing the torch of history, and as being as much about forging a new kind of society as about forging steel’. The attempt was not unsuccessful; among the children of the first generation of workers, themselves born and raised in Bhilai, provincial loyalties were superseded by a more inclusive patriotism, a ‘more cosmopolitan cultural style’.38
More recently, it has been the private sector which has, if with less intent, furthered the process of national integration. Firms headquartered in Tamil Nadu set up cement plants in Haryana; doctors born and educated in Assam establish clinics in Bombay. Many of the engineers in Hyderabad’s IT industry come from Bihar. The migration is not restricted to the professional classes; there are barbers from Uttar Pradesh working in the city of Bangalore, as well as carpenters from Rajasthan. However, it must be said that the flow is not symmetrical. While the cities and towns that are ‘booming’ become ever more cosmopolitan, economically laggard states sink deeper into provincialism.
VI
Apart from elements of politics and economics, cultural factors have also contributed to national unity. Pre-eminent here is the Hindi film. This is the great popular passion of the Indian people, watched and followed by Indians of all ages, genders, castes, classes, religions and linguistic groups.
Each formally recognized state of the Union, says the lyricist Javed Akhtar, ‘has its different culture, tradition and style. In Gujarat, you have one kind of culture, then you go to Punjab, you have another, and the same applies in Rajasthan, Bengal, Orissa or Kerala. Then Akhtar adds, ‘There is one more state in this country, and that is Hindi cinema.’39
This is a stunning insight which asks to be developed further. As a separate state of India, Hindi cinema acts as a receptacle for all that (in a cultural sense) is most creative in the other states. Thus its actors, musicians, technicians and directors come from all parts of India. Thus also it draws ecumenically from cultural forms prevalent in different regions. For example a single song may feature both the Punjabi folk dance called the bhangra and its Tamil classical counterpart, bharatan-atyam.
Having borrowed elements from here, there and everywhere, the Hindi film then sends the synthesized product out for appreciation to the other states of the Union. The most widely revered Indians are film stars. Yet cinema does not merely provide Indians with a common pantheon of heroes; it also gives them a common language and universe of discourse. Lines from film songs and snatches from film dialogue are ubiquitously used in conversations in schools, colleges, homes and offices – and on the street. Because it is one more state of the Union, Hindi cinema also speaks its own language – one that is understood by all the others.
The last sentence is meant literally as well as metaphorically. Hindi cinema provides a stock of social situations and moral conundrums which widely resonate with the citizenry as a whole. But, over time, it has also made the Hindi language more comprehensible to those who previously never spoke or understood it. When imposed by fiat by the central government, Hindi was resisted by the people of the south and the east. When conveyed seductively by the medium of cinema and television, Hindi has been accepted by them. In Bangalore and Hyderabad Hindi has become the preferred medium of communication between those who speak mutually incomprehensible tongues. Finally, one might instance the banning of Hindi films, DVDs and videos by insurgents in the north-east: this, in its own way, is a considerable tribute to the part played by the Hindi film in uniting India.
In 1888 John Strachey wrote that he could never imagine that Punjab and Madras could ever form part of a single political entity. But in 1947 they did, along with many other provinces Strachey regarded as distinct ‘nations’. While in 1947 the unity might have been mostly political, in the decades since it has been shown also to be economic, cultural and, it must be said, emotional. Perhaps many Kashmiris and Nagas yet feel alien and separate. And perhaps some revolutionaries believe that India is a land of many nationalities. But the bulk of those who are legally citizens of India are happy to be counted as such. Some four-fifths of the population, living in some four-fifths of the country, clearly feel themselves to be part of a single nation.
VII
One might think of independent India as being Europe’s past as well as its future. It is Europe’s past, in that it has reproduced, albeit more fiercely and intensely, the conflicts of a modernizing, industrializing and urbanizing society. But it is also its future in that it anticipated, by some fifty years, the European attempt to create a multilingual, multireligious, multiethnic, political and economic community.
Or one might compare India with the United States, a country justly celebrated as ‘the planet’s first multiethnic democracy’.40 Born nearly two centuries later, the Republic of India is today comfortably the world’s largest multiethnic democracy. However, the means by which it has regulated (and moderated) relations between its constituent ethnicities have been somewhat different. For, as Samuel Huntingdon has recently argued, the American nation has been held together by a ‘credal culture’ whose ‘central elements’ have included ‘the Christian religion, Protestant values and moralism, a work ethic, the English language, British traditions of law, justice, and the limits of government power, and a legacy of European art, literature, philosophy, and music’. Indeed, ‘America was crea
The United States is, of course, a nation of immigrants. For much of the country’s history the new groups that came in merged themselves with the dominant culture. ‘Throughout American history’, writes Huntingdon, ‘people who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants have become Americans by adopting America’s Anglo-Protestant culture and political values’. Of late, however, newer groups of immigrants have tended to maintain their distinct identities. The largest of these are the Hispanics, who live in enclaves where they cook their own food, listen to their own kind of music, follow their own faith and – most importantly – speak their own language. Huntingdon worries that if these communities are not quickly brought in to line, they will ‘transform America as a whole into a bilingual, bicultural society .
The older American model of assimilation was called ‘the melting-pot’. Individual groups poured all their flavours into the pot, then drank asingle, uniform – or uniformly tasting – drink. Now it appears that the society, and nation, are coming to resemble a ‘salad bowl’, with each group starkly standing out, different and distinctive in how it looks and behaves.
Huntingdon himself is less than enthusiastic about the idea of the salad bowl. For him, America has long been, and must always be, a ‘society with a single pervasive national culture’. He observes that Americans identify most strongly with that culture when the nation is under threat. War leads not merely to national consolidation, but also to cultural unity. The original American Creed was forged as a consequence of the wars against the Native Americans, the English colonists and the Southern States. The events of 9/11 once more brought patriotism and national solidarity to the fore. Concerned that these energies will dissipate, Huntingdon urges a more thoroughgoing return to the creed that, in his view, was responsible for ‘the unity and strength of my country’.41
Interestingly, Huntingdon’s views find an echo in recent statements by the prime minister of Australia, John Howard. That country too has been subject to successive waves of immigration, mostly or wholly European to begin with, but more recently of a markedly Asian character. Howard rejects the possibility of a plurality of cultures co-existing in Australia. ‘You ve got to have a dominant culture’, he says, adding, ‘Ours is Anglo-Saxon – our language, our literature, our institutions.’42
The Huntingdon–Howard line of reasoning is, of course, quite familiar to students of Indian history. It has been made in India by political ideologues such as M. S. Golwalkar and by political parties such as the Jana Sangh and the BJP. They have argued that India has ‘got to have a dominant culture’, and that this culture is ‘Hindu’. As it happened, those views were not endorsed by the founders of the Indian nation, by those who wrote the Indian Constitution and led the first few governments of independent India. Thus India became a salad-bowl nation rather than a melting-pot one.
And it has stayed that way. It has sustained a diversity of religions and languages, precisely the diversities that the likes of Howard and Huntingdon deem inimical to national survival and national solidarity. It has resisted the pressures to go in the other direction, to follow Israel and Pakistan by favouring citizens who follow a certain faith or speak a particular language.
VIII
The most eloquent tribute to the idea of India that I have come across rests in some unpublished letters of the biologist J. B. S. Haldane. In his native Britain, Haldane was a figure of considerable fame and some notoriety. In 1956, already past sixty, he decided to leave his post in University College London and take up residence in Calcutta. He joined the Indian Statistical Institute, became an Indian citizen, wore Indian clothes and ate Indian food. He also travelled energetically around the country, engaging with its scientists but also with the citizenry at large.43
Five years after Haldane had moved to India, an American science writer described him in print as a ‘citizen of the world’. Haldane replied:
No doubt I am in some sense a citizen of the world. But I believe with Thomas Jefferson that one of the chief duties of a citizen is to be a nuisance to the government of his state. As there is no world state, I cannot do this . . . On the other hand I can be, and am, a nuisance to the government of India, which has the merit of permitting a good deal of criticism, though it reacts to it rather slowly. I also happen to be proud of being a citizen of India, which is a lot more diverse than Europe, let alone the USA, USSR, or China, and thus a better model for a possible world organisation. It may of course break up, but it is a wonderful experiment. So I want to be labelled as a citizen of India.44
On another occasion Haldane described India as ‘the closest approximation to the Free World’. An American friend protested, saying his impression was that ‘India has its fair share of scoundrels and a tremendous amount of poor unthinking and disgustingly subservient individuals who are not attractive’.45 To this Haldane responded:
Perhaps one is freer to be as coundrel in India than elsewhere. So one was in the USA in the days of people like Jay Gould, when (in my opinion) there was more internal freedom in the USA than there is today. The ‘disgusting subservience’ of the others has its limits. The people of Calcutta riot, upset trams, and refuse to obey police regulations, in a manner which would have delighted Jefferson. I don’t think their activities are very efficient, but that is not the question at issue.46
Forty years down the line, what Haldane called a ‘wonderful experiment’ might be counted as a success, a modest success. Poverty persists in some (admittedly broad) pockets, yet one can now be certain that India will not go the way of sub-Saharan Africa and witness widespread famine. Secessionist movements are active here and there, but there is no longer any fear that India will follow the former Yugoslavia and break up into a dozen fratricidal parts. The powers of the state are sometimes grossly abused, but no one seriously thinks that India will emulate neighbouring Pakistan, where the chief of army staff is generally also head of government.
As a modern nation, India is simply sui generic. It stands on its own, different and distinct from the alternative political models on offer – be these Anglo-Saxon liberalism, French republicanism, atheistic communism, or Islamic theocracy. Back in 1971, at the time of the Bangladesh crisis, when India found itself simultaneously at odds with communist China, Islamic Pakistan and America, an Indian diplomat captured his country’s uniqueness in this way:
India is regarded warily in the West because she is against the concept of Imperialism and because she ‘invented’ the ‘Third World’.
India is looked on with suspicion in the ‘Third World’ because of her (subversive) sentiments for democracy, human rights, etc.; the Muslim world is wrathful because of our secularism.
The Communist countries regard India as insolent – and potentially dangerous – because we have rejected Communism as the prime condition for Progress.
We are, of course, on the side of God. But is God on our side?47
The writer whose lines open this book, the nineteenth-century poet Ghalib, thought that God was indeed on the side of India. All around him were conflict and privation, but doomsday had not yet come. ‘Why does not the Last Trumpet sound? asked Ghalib of a sage in the holy city of Benares. ‘Who holds the reins of the Final Catastrophe?’ This was the answer he got:
The hoary old man of lucent ken
Pointed towards Kashi and gently smiled.
‘The Architect’, he said, ‘is fond of this edifice
Because of which there is colour in life; He
Would not like it to perish and fall’.
Ghalib and his interlocutor were speaking then of India, the civilization. Speaking now of India, the nation-state, one must insist that its future lies not in the hands of God but in the mundane works of men. So long as the constitution is not amended beyond recognition, so long as elections are held regularly and fairly and the ethos of secularism br
Acknowledgements
In close to five decades as a citizen of India I have had plenty of opportunity to discover that this is sometimes the most exasperating country in the world. However, it was only while working on its modern history that I found that it was at all times the most interesting. It was my friend Peter Straus who set me off on the journey, by suggesting that I write a book on independent India. And it was the selfless tribe of archivists and librarians who made the journey an adventure rich in thrills and unexpected discoveries.