An original, even startling, analysis of India?s contemporary history
Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India
Ananya Vajpeyi
Harvard University Press, Rs 995, Pp 368
Mani Shankar Aiyar
Ananya Vajpeyi?s Righteous Republic is quite simply the most important interpretation of the evolution of India?s contemporary nationhood since Sunil Khilnani?s The Idea of India, and a useful antidote to the revisionist Imperialism of rising British star-historians like Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson, as well as the silly, stray thoughts of Meghnad Desai?s The Rediscovery of India, the axing of the modern Indian state on the mission civilisatrice of Zareer Masani?s recent biography of Lord Macaulay, and even the purely political story recounted in BR Nanda?s The Making of the Indian Nation and Ramachandra Guha?s many works. Fluently written, cogent in argument, studded with penetrating insights, telling aphorisms, with complete mastery of her material, consistently brilliant expression and exposition, this young philosopher-historian takes her definitive place as a commentator and synthesiser of the often varied and contradictory approaches to the idea of India in the life, thought and works of her five (somewhat arbitrarily chosen) protagonists: Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, BR Ambedkar, and the two Tagores?Rabindranath and Abanindranath.
She is nothing if not original, even startling, in showing how these diverse and even contrary streams of reflection and experience mingled to give India not only a sense of her ?self? (What is India?) but also of the ?sovereignty? she was striving for (What is India to make of its independence once achieved?)?the swa (or ?self?) in ?Swaraj? giving meaning and content to the struggle for raj (or national sovereignty). She shows how in the midst of the quest to wrest freedom, these freedom fighters concerned themselves not only with making the new Indian republic free, independent and democratic, but also to give it a moral compass in being ?Righteous? by drawing on both the rich treasury of past Indian tradition and modern global thought (at the time, largely western). ?I try?, she writes, ?to tell the story of the search for the self in modern India…that raj would have to be found in the future, that swa would be discovered in the past?.
Vajpeyi finds her theoretical construct in the work of Scottish philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre, who has argued that ?a crisis in the self is a crisis in the tradition that has formed the self?. India?s crisis in tradition lay not only in the collapse of sovereignty or the humiliating century of colonial expansion from the Battle of Plassey (Palasi) in 1757 to the crushing defeat of the insurrection exactly a century later in 1857, but perhaps even more in the twin surrender of the Indian intellectual elite to Macaulayism: the loss of even access to indigenous traditions and its replacement by absorption into alien traditions. ?The rout of Indian traditions was so complete? writes Vajpeyi, ?that India?s nationalist elite…were schooled purely in Western thought?Indian traditions of theorizing the self…and Indian traditions of theorizing sovereignty?Sanskritic, Islamic or other?were effectively unavailable to India?s nationalist elite?(the) ?brown sahibs? were estranged from Indian traditions both by force of habit and free choice…unmoored from all established protocols for the authorization of knowledge?.
But?and this was the turning point that over the next 90 years led from servile submission to the glory of freedom (and gory partition)??their exposure to Western modernity gave to these men the requisite insouciant confidence (emphasis added) to pick up and read an ancient and difficult text according to their own lights?European Indology (so deplored by Macaulay?the reviewer?s interpolation) stepped in to replace the fugitive Sanskrit traditions?. She should have added?and this is the worst flaw in her book?the Islamist traditions that over the past millennium had become integral to the nationalist discourse. Had she done so, it would have led her straight to Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and from there to Allama Iqbal and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, on the one hand, and to Badshah Khan and Maulana Azad on the other. Fortunately, we have Rajmohan Gandhi?s Understanding the Muslim Mind, a guided tour through the life, thought and work of eight 20th century Muslim thinkers and statesmen, four of whom were integrationists and four who were (or, rather, became) separatists. It is an essential companion volume to this work to comprehend the range of rediscovery and re-interpretation of the totality of Indian tradition that led eventually to not only the displacement of the colonial authority, but also to partition as the price that had to be paid as the price for independence.
I queried Ananya Vajpeyi at the book launch about this gaping lacuna in her otherwise outstanding work, but she defended herself saying that although this was, indeed, a glaring lacuna, she knew neither Urdu nor Persian to do justice to these Muslim luminaries. A weak argument, I thought, since she also knows little Bengali, Gujarati or Marathi and has retrieved most of her material from English translations. Almost everything of note that relates to the varied Muslim views of nationhood is also available in excellent English or English translations. But why blame her? Perhaps India was partitioned precisely because so many non-Muslim nationalists (Nehru being the big exception) understood so little the erstwhile Muslim ruling class?s view of the colonial assault on their traditions, and consequently their apprehensions as to the implications of an independence in which they would not be the sole masters, that the nationalist vision led as inevitably to independence as it did to partition.
Of her five protagonists, at least four could hardly have been more different from each other in their respective approaches to the nature of India?s nationhood.
?India?s political modernity,? argues Vajpeyi, ?is unimaginable without Gandhi. This is ironic, given Gandhi?s objection to modernity along every significant vector: capitalism, biopolitics, technological development, industrialism, atheism, and pervasive, endemic violence?. And while she concedes that critics evaluate Gandhi in the idioms of ?utopianism, nostalgia, antimodernism, saintliness or, worst case, reactionary traditionalism?, it is indubitably Mahatma Gandhi, drawing his inspiration from his highly personalised and even eccentric reading of the Gita, who ?altered the very language of politics in India?. It is he, she says, who ?invented? the two key categories of thought and action that laid the ?political foundations of modern India?: swaraj, by giving it a novel twist from Bal Gangadhar Tilak?s understanding, and ahimsa as a category of not just ethical personal behaviour but as an instrument of powerful political action. In doing so, Gandhi made every Indian responsible for reordering his personal ethical self to fit himself for the task of restoring to India its lost sense of self by politically liberating the country. Gandhi succeeded principally because he drew from the deep well-springs of millennial Indian traditions that had been lost perhaps to the westernised elite of the late 19th-early 20th centuries, but continued to reside deep in the consciousness and sub-consciousness of the collective Indian ?self?. Moreover, Gandhi set himself up as the exemplar of reordering his personal conduct to the demanding task of renunciation as the road to political victory. ?Politics, ethics, and metaphysics began for the first time to share a common conceptual terrain?. Thus did Gandhian nationalism ?ground itself in the idea of a political tradition that has, at once, historical continuity, pan-Indian resonance, and a creative capacity, responsive to the needs of a rapidly transforming present?.
Nehru had little time for Gandhi?s goat?s milk view of the authentic Indian tradition, but recognised and submitted himself to the underlying Gandhian ethic, agonising endlessly over ends and means, and trying to harmonise dharma, as moral principle, with artha, as practical politics. Vajpeyi nicely contrasts the high idealism of the Nehru of The Discovery of India with the highly pragmatic Nehru of his assiduously written fortnightly Letters to Chief Ministers, edited and published in several volumes by S Gopal, the son of the mentor Nehru acquired after Gandhi?s death, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. Where the proto-Nehru is ?obsessed?, as he himself confesses, with ?the thought of India? as he discovers the moral signposts in her ?long and tangled past?, in order to establish a republic that is ?righteous?, he learns through blunt experience as prime minister that the Mauryan empire, his ideal, needed a Chankaya to counsel an Asoka. ?In a way,? says the cheeky young Vajpeyi of the Gentle Colossus, ?Nehru saw himself as the new Asoka?.
The prodigious genius of BR Ambedkar, profoundly learned not only in the law but in all the spiritual traditions of the land, an amazing polymath who mastered an array of Indian and foreign languages, classical and contemporary, is finally resumed in his embrace of the Buddhist view of dukha as the leitmotif of existence, but less as the individual suffering of traditional Buddhism, more as the ?collective suffering? of his community, leading eventually to his reinterpretation of traditional Buddhism as neither Hinayana nor Mahayana but Navayana (the New Way). Despite his lifelong struggle against Gandhi and his intense distrust of the other makers of India?s contemporary nationhood, he was, says, Vajpeyi, ?of a piece with his peers: attending to history and refashioning history, immersed in tradition and in revolt against tradition, in mourning over a lost self and eagerly searching for a new self?.
Of the Tagores, uncle and nephew, Gurudev Rabindranath and the artist Abanindranath, Vajpeyi traverses a territory rarely explored by historians or even philosophers?the aesthetic of the freedom struggle as discovered in paintings and sculpture, music and dance, poetry and prose. It leads to Gurudev?s rejection of the very nationalism that his political peers were trying to rouse and mobilise, preferring that the ?Heaven of Freedom? in which his country awake be one that is in a world that ?has not been broken up by narrow domestic walls?. Abanindranath begins with a ?triad?, as Vajpeyi describes it, of three paintings of Shah Jahan built around his Taj Mahal, including one that won the silver medal at the Delhi Durbar of 1903, to the ?Asian art? of the Japanese painter, Kakuzo Okakura, and then through Ananda Coomraswamy to the apogee of ?a vision, a panorama, an immense horizon of a possible art in which one could conceive of Indic understandings of power, death, love, beauty, and so on, conveyed via a system of signs and meanings proper to them, and standing apart from the overbearing conventions of European art?.
Thus did these five highly contentious conceptions of India?s nationhood indigenise, vernacularise and authenticate India?s sense of ?self? and ?sovereignty? to prepare the nation for a ?Righteous Republic?. But where has that righteousness gone? Moral bankruptcy, institutional collapse, administrative dystrophy, judicial system in a shambles, and the space for public discourse taken over by shallow, screaming anchors?the republic remains, at least for the present, but leached of much of its righteousness. There is again ?a crisis in the self that is a crisis in the tradition that formed the self?. We are back where we were. Pray that another Gandhi, another Nehru rise like a Phoenix out of the ashes to which we have reduced their Righteous Republic.
Mani Shankar Aiyar is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha