Abstract
In an effort to illuminate the genesis of what we have termed Indian metamorphosis , the present chapter invokes the foundational role of European (or more broadly, Western) Enlightenment movement (and its far-reaching ideational, political and sociocultural revolutions) just preceding (and during the first phase of) the Industrial Revolution in the emergence of modern industrial, secular and democratic civilization.
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Notes
- 1.
Indeed, current global circumstances, popular mood and dominant intellectual climate appear so comprehensively immersed into an increasingly ‘virtual’ world of the present and future as to easily evoke one’s suspicion whether the subject of Enlightenment and its historical significance does still receive enough space nowadays in school curricula and recommended texts globally, as it used to be at least until WWII.
- 2.
To illustrate: the Encyclopedia Britannica’s essay on Modernization begins as follows: ‘To modernize a society is, first of all, to industrialize it…. It is by undergoing the comprehensive transformation of industrialization that societies become modern’. This statement clearly presupposes as if ‘modernization’ does not necessarily need to be founded or to be even accompanied by a mass intellectual/ideational change typically connoted by the term ‘enlightenment’ that heralded—in the history of the world—a epochal victory of reason and rationality over blind faith/unreason and related irrational values, attitudes, emotions and sentiments.
- 3.
- 4.
See, for example, Frankel et al. (2002), Frankel (2005), Harriss-White (2002), Harriss-White and Heyer (2014), Desai (2002, 2009), Corbridge et al. (2013), Drèze and Sen (2013), Anderson (2015), Guha (2007, 2010), Mehta (2003), Sen (2005), Khilnani (2004), Luce (2011), and Nussbaum (2007) among others.
- 5.
As for a few random instances, Mehta (2003: ix) makes quite explicit that the aim of his analysis on the nature, practices and challenges of democracy in contemporary India ‘is to hopefully enlighten, but not instruct; those looking for “solutions” will be disappointed’. Anderson (2015: 224) in his book, The Indian Ideology, ‘sought to lay out the coordinates of the ideology, and its consequences’—but neither its genesis, nor the means to its transformation ahead. Desai (2002), while tracing India’s present major predicament to its impossibility of being simultaneously secular and pro-liberalization reformist, sees a grand coalition between BJP and Congress as a solution, which, as he envisages, could only become an ultimate reality in the wake of a plausible emergence of India’s grand nationalist sentiment and urge to catch up, and compete, with China. The stated motivation behind Amartya Sen’s widely-received The Argumentative Indian consists of ‘social and political understanding in India’ and of finding its true position in ‘the classification of the cultures of the world’ (Sen 2005: xiv), rather than of tracing the genesis of its ideational/ideological impasses as major obstacles to its sustained all-round development with fair social order and stability.
- 6.
This distinction between the two approaches to policy formulation is of much significance. For example, a policy premised on a narrow economic assumption that a household’s private behaviours, gender relations or such other culturally shaped perceptions and decisions and their combined social outcomes are amenable to intended changes through purely monetary incentives or disincentives (e.g. waiving of tuition fees for girls, giving them bicycles, or offering some other material incentives), is intrinsically ameliorative/palliative in nature. In contrast, a policy/programme for transforming people’s outlook, ideas, perceptions, values from within through inter alias effective and appropriately designed content of elementary education in tune with core Enlightenment ideas is genuinely and durably transformative.
- 7.
A few authors, of course, note an anomalous feature of Indian democratic experiment wherein ‘A Political Revolution Preceded a Social One’ (Mehta 2003: 51). While its ramifications are discussed chiefly within the realm of Indian social structure and social inequality, this line of argument misses out the central concern of our present analysis, namely the overriding importance of ideational revolution and ideological transformation towards establishing a reign of reason and rationality (as opposed to the grip of faith, religion and irrational emotions and sentiments) as a foundation of stable democratic and economic progress.
- 8.
We add the term, ‘Western’ as a prefix to word ‘Enlightenment’ (instead of writing only ‘Enlightenment’), with a view to distinguishing it from a notion of what is essentially ‘spiritual-enlightenment’ of which major illustrations include India’s ‘Hindu Religious Enlightenment’ or ‘Buddhist Enlightenment’ ; see, e.g., Rajneesh (1990) on one variant of Indian spiritual-Enlightenment. Also, we define ‘Western Enlightenment’ in a broad historical sense that encompasses the European Enlightenment movement beginning in the seventeenth century or perhaps a little earlier and its subsequent spread in American colonies during the eighteenth century and sooner or later in other Western nations and also in Japan since the mid-nineteenth century. Although exact dates and detailed processes of the spread of the Enlightenment ideas have been far from uniform across the West, our focus is on its core essential impact in form of rising sway of reason, rationality and secularism over the pre-existing dominant influences of Church or religion at a wider societal scale. Note also that our emphasis on historic differential in the internalization of core Enlightenment values between the West and many non-Western countries has no intended bearing on what is currently connoted by the so-called clash of civilization, a (highly controverted) term/concept propagated by Samuel Huntington (1997). In a similar vein, that India has absorbed many Western or British cultural attributes and norms largely through (or because of) its colonial past cannot make ‘futile’ our present analysis even if it amounts to our separating out ‘the British elements of “Indian culture” from the rest of what is Indian’ (Nussbaum 2007: 7), albeit, of course, with no intention of championing ‘Western civilization’ as being superior to, or in clash with, non-Western one—an exercise about which Amartya Sen has passionately been critical (e.g. Sen 2006: Chapter 5).
- 9.
For lucid field-based observations, illustrations and manifestations of an intrinsically dilemmatic duality (between tradition and modernity) on an Indian intellectual or ideational plane, see Shils (1961).
- 10.
For example, Joel Mokyr in his recent research has persuasively shown how the Industrial Revolution in the West was almost a direct fallout of what he calls ‘Industrial Enlightenment’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—‘a belief in the possibility and desirability of economic progress and growth through knowledge’, which derives straight from the Baconian notion that ‘we can attain material progress (i.e. economic growth) through controlling nature’ (Mokyr 2005: 291). There is a substantial literature depicting how Enlightenment ideas and values had greatly facilitated a steady transformation of traditional Western societies into secular, democratic and liberal polities eminently conducive to sustained capitalistic growth, development and overall material flourishing (see, e.g., Zafirovski 2011 and literature cited therein).
- 11.
- 12.
The eminent Enlightenment scholar, Jonathan Israel , has shown of late that there were two somewhat distinct schools of Enlightenment thinking . The mainstream or moderate approach, represented by Kant, Locke, Hume and Voltaire, sought to limit the scope of reason by blending it with faith and tradition. A more radical group of Enlightenment thinkers, namely Diderot, Condorcet and Spinoza, ‘pursued a principled reason-based approach, questioning existing arrangements and seeking radical change’ such as abolition of slavery and colonialism, promotion of equality and democracy to their extremes (Collins 2017: 2).
- 13.
In the pre-Enlightenment period, education was restricted to teaching a limited number of professions such as priests, physicians, bureaucrats and scribes, but in the ‘Age of Reason’ education not only ceased to be confined to certain class or gender, but it also entailed changes in educational content and orientation towards teaching the value and power of reason, rationality and scientism in organizing human life and society. Indeed, ‘Disciples of Rousseau, the legislators of the First Republic wanted to make citizens free by liberating their minds from prejudice through education’ (Clifford-Vaughan 1963: 135, emphasis added).
- 14.
For a useful account of how Enlightenment ideas (including scientific rationality and liberal values) were imparted through elementary school education across entire populations in European, American and other Western countries beginning from the seventeenth century, see the chapter ‘Education’ in Britannica Online Encyclopaedia (accessible from www.britannica.com/topic/179408).
- 15.
A subtle distinction between ‘modernization’ and ‘Westernization’ is often drawn by scholars. The example of contemporary Japan clearly demonstrates that ‘modernization’ does not necessarily entail ‘Westernization’. To put this distinction in Deepak Lal’s words: ‘Whereas modernization entails a change in belief about the way the material world operates, Westernization entails a change in cosmological beliefs about the way that one should live. Like China and unlike Japan, India resisted changes in its ancient beliefs about the way the world works (and should work) which modernization entails. Instead, like many Islamic countries today, India wrongly believed Gandhi’s doctrine that modernization necessarily means Westernization’ (Lal 2002). Also, Amartya Sen (2005: Chapter 13) has convincingly argued that there have been many historical instances of monarchies/empires in India and other non-Western countries, which did value and recognize the significance of reason and reasoning in organizing and functioning of human society and polity. As Sen remarks, ‘[w]e need not begin with pessimism, at least on this ground [that ideas relevant to use of reasoning are specific to Western culture], about the prospects of reasoned humanism in the world’ (Sen 2005: 287).
- 16.
Given the crude literacy rate of around 5% in 1901, and that the term ‘literacy’ connotes vastly less than what is meant by being ‘educated’, one can easily guess how tiny (or indeed negligible) was the size of India’s population affected by newer ideas and practices of social reforms movement in the nineteenth century.
- 17.
This point is largely missed out in Partha Chatterjee’s theorization and his key emphasis on a general phenomenon of what he calls ‘colonial difference’, which is treated by him almost as an exogenous colonial dictum attributable to nationalist leaders and their stark anti-colonial stance across Asia and Africa. However, the question as to why an approach of colonial difference, rather than an emulation of standard Western ‘modular pattern’ (at least in the spheres of ideational/ideological modernization and transformation), was chosen by these nationalist leaders remains somewhat dodged (see Chatterjee 2005).
- 18.
Louis Dumont writes about Gandhi’s mediating or middle-path strategy in face of nationalist reformists’ urge for reforms even before Independence: ‘Gandhi was conscious of the contradiction involved in a caste society demanding anything like “home rule” … he insisted that India should show her capacity to reform herself even while asking to be left alone…it was necessary to show the beginning of reform, but reform was, in fact if not consciously, subordinated to independence’ (quoted in Srinivas 1972: 87).
- 19.
In fact, Mahatma Gandhi tended, particularly in his later life, to reject strongly the Eurocentric Enlightenment and modernity. His view, of course, could not prevail over Jawaharlal Nehru’s nationalist rhetoric of ‘modernity with a difference’ soon after the Independence.
- 20.
One author, for example, wrote in the early post-Independence period: ‘The new way of life is only possible through a deliberate cultivation of the scientific attitude that removes the deadwood of superstition, kills the fanaticism of the mind and kindles a new spirit of inquiry, analysis and objectivity. A mental revolution is necessary’ (L. S. Chandrakaut, ‘Problems of Technological Change’, Yojana, 1 October 1961; taken from Myrdal 1968: vol. 1, p. 57, fn. 2). Note that the means by which this could be brought about are left unspecified or at best vaguely implicit.
- 21.
As pointed out rather eloquently by Perry Anderson (2015: 54), ‘in much the same artless way as Gandhi, he [Nehru] identified the religion with the nation’. Indeed Nehru candidly writes, ‘Hinduism became the symbol of nationalism. It was indeed a national religion, with those deep instincts, racial and cultural, which form the basis everywhere of nationalism today’ (quoted in ibid.: 54).
- 22.
In this context, it is illuminating to quote Perry Anderson’s comments on Nehru’s mind and his line of thinking on the basis of the former’s careful rethinking and re-reading of select excerpts from Nehru’s masterpiece The Discovery of India: ‘it illustrates not just Nehru’s lack of formal scholarship and addiction to romantic myth, but something deeper, not so much an intellectual but a psychological limitation – a capacity for self-deception with far reaching political consequences’ (Anderson 2015: 53).
- 23.
The concept of path-dependence is often used in the ‘new institutional economics’ and is meant to explain how a set of decisions one faces presently under given circumstance gets limited by the decisions one made in the past or by the past events that one experienced, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant now.
- 24.
Some Indian authors have gone even to the point of saying that ‘the truly religious people are usually deeply secular’ as illustrated by the lives of Mohandas Gandhi and Maulana Azad (Das 2003).
- 25.
For example, Ashis Nandy’s core argument, positing—often rather assertively—a hollowness of ‘Western style of secularism’ and its wider adverse ramifications, is made with little reference to existing relevant literature and perspectives produced by contemporary and other scholars and social scientists at large. However, Amartya Sen has powerfully argued that India’s predominant image—in both colonial and post-colonial periods—of its being intellectually rich chiefly in spiritual and religious/theological/mystical spheres, not in terms of faculties of scientific inquiry, mathematics, logic and reasoning, is seriously flawed and partial (Sen 2005). This latter point reinforces our present chapter’s one important thrust, namely that Western Enlightenment ideas/values could be infused, for the better, into Indian minds through appropriate mass educational programmes, curriculum and other intelligent campaigns.
- 26.
‘Science park’ consists of an outdoor garden and a small museum displaying some playful instruments with applications of basic scientific principles of the natural world such as law of gravity, sound waves or light, which are supposed to inspire the young and illiterate adult visitors towards imbibing scientific spirits and temper.
- 27.
It is worth noting here that of late the Supreme Court of India in its 2002 verdict over a question whether teaching of religion can be made a part of school curriculum for sake of imparting so-called value education has disturbingly diluted further the already-deformed notion of Indian secularism: ‘“Secularism” can be practiced by adopting a complete neutral approach or by a positive approach by making one section of religious people to understand and respect religion and faith of another section of people’ (taken from Kumar 2002: 5154, emphasis added).
- 28.
This line of thinking attracted strong scepticism expressed most notably by Rabindranath Tagore, who advocated an overriding priority to be assigned to the need for Indian masses’ awakening to humanistic and rationalistic ideas/values through inter alias programmes for widespread basic education even prior to attainment of self-rule, rather than being frenzy about embarking on large-scale industrialization with modern technology in India’s otherwise paramount context of mass illiteracy, superstitions, narrow religiosities and blind faiths.
- 29.
As Tariq Banuri (1987) writes, ‘[t]he early days of this project [modernization theory] were characterized by an unalloyed confidence in the ability of social scientists to help the people of Third World countries banish their inherited problems and construct a new social reality from scratch’ (p. 6), and that ‘the unqualified support they received from nationalising elites (such as India’s Prime Minister Nehru) in the receiving countries whose faith in the beneficence of Western rationality was, if anything, even more unequivocal’ (fn. 125).
- 30.
B. R. Ambedkar has, of course, been one prominent exception among the entire post-Independence political leadership under the Nehruvian shadow, who voiced the urgency of sociocultural and religious reforms towards people’s Enlightenment prior to embarking on large-scale industrialization and technological modernization. Otherwise, the entire development effort in India would amount to, as Ambedkar writes, ‘building a castle on dung heap’ (quoted in Omvedt 2004). Although the recent period has witnessed an enhanced awareness of India’s political leadership about the key instrumentality of universal basic education, the uncertainty over their success looms pretty large, especially after major global and geopolitical overhauls (e.g., ‘globalization’, ‘liberalization’), rising tides of sociopolitical and non-secular forces and related complications have overwhelmed India’s overall educational scene (see, e.g., Maharatna 2013, Chapter 11, 2014). This latter theme deserves a separate and thorough investigation and research on its own right—a task which is beyond the scope of the present book.
- 31.
This is not to deny that there are limits of reason and science. While these limitations have often induced some thinkers to critique governmental and non-governmental special initiatives at the propagation and campaigns for ‘Scientific Temper and Spirits’ among masses, a tremendous value of upholding the sanctity of reason and evidence-based approach to life seems indisputable (see, e.g., Siddharthan 2017).
- 32.
To illustrate how religion or religious beliefs/rituals are often given precedence over rational/scientific considerations in public spheres even by the governments of ‘secular’ India: the Transport Dept. of Delhi has recently come out with a Gazette notification which makes wearing of helmets mandatory for all women riding bikes except Sikh women on ‘religious grounds’ (The Times of India (Delhi), 29 August 2014).
- 33.
In his incisive dissection of ‘the culture of the Indian intellectual’ in the early 1960s, Edward Shils observes that most of the Indian ‘intellectuals’ [about 90% of those interviewed] ‘have – as compared with their fellow intellectuals in Europe and America – a quite elaborate religious consciousness, ranging from the performance of religious exercises early each morning, the daily reading of a sacred text, and the temptation to “go into the forest” to an ineffable sense of the working of a trans-individual power or a belief that there is a ruling spirit in the universe’ (Shils 1961: 64).
- 34.
This statement refers partly to the fact of Dr. Dhabolkar, an anti-superstition crusader and rationalist activist having been assassinated in Pune about four years back with nearly total impunity so far. Following this terrifying incident, a number of rationalist thinkers and activists have been killed, the latest probably being the brutal assassination of Gouri Lankesh, an independent-minded anti-right-winger woman journalist and activist.
- 35.
It is worth noting here that both senior and younger political leaders and ministers are increasingly seen to practice overtly various Hindu religious rituals and practices even in the day-to-day running of the government, such as Bhumi Pooja during an event of laying foundation stone of a new projects or constructions, and installation of Hindu deities (pictures or idols) within government office premises presumably at the expense of public money, all of which were almost unthinkable even during the first few decades after India’s Independence and of course earlier.
- 36.
- 37.
It is notable that Meghnad Desai in his recent attempt at tracking down the real roots of India’s current complexities and maladies, proximately precipitated by its diversities and divisiveness, concludes thus: “India is a nation of its billion common citizens living under a Constitution in a vibrant, thriving democracy. It is time to rediscover this India’ (Desai 2009: 465). While this viewpoint does not sound incongruent with the one argued in our present analysis, this mission seems hardly achievable without awakening—or perhaps reawakening—its billion-plus people to reason, rationality and secular outlook through inter alias suitable education.
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Maharatna, A. (2019). India’s Costly Evasion from ‘Enlightenment’ Ideas and Values. In: The Indian Metamorphosis. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0797-3_2
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