Resistance against a common political actor has played a defining role in the emergence of most nationalisms around the world. The wars against the ‘French’ turned England into a nation, even before any semblance of French nationalism emerging.
Author: Vikram
A millennium of exits from India
The last one thousand years has seen a consistent and substantial shrinking of the Indian world. There are three large scale processes involved in this folding. The first is the exit of the peasantry and warrior castes from India’s margins to the Perso-Islamic world. The second is the de-Indicization of South East Asia, first with Islam replacing Hinduism/Buddhism as the main religion in much of maritime South East Asia, followed by the West becoming the main source of cultural and political influence. The third is the exit of highly educated Indians (overwhelmingly upper caste Hindus) to the West, either physically as migrants or intellectually in terms of mindspace.
The development of a sophisticated, reflective culture in India and its culmination in literary and spiritual terms as the various Indian epics and religions was enabled by the complex intermingling of nomadic and settled societies and the abundant surplus of riverine India’s highly fertile land. Consider this, the pre-industrial population of Uttar Pradesh (47 million in 1871), was more than the population of all of Western Europe combined. But the last 1000 years has seen India contribute very little to the rest of the world despite its natural and intellectual riches.
As modern day citizens of the Republic of India become increasingly self aware about their customs, language and history, their mind will turn to why India remained subdued for such a long time. Notwithstanding convenient pronouncements about India’s ‘ability’ to ‘absorb’ various influences, it remains a fact that there are no Sanskrit or Tamil high words in Arabic, and there is no influence of Indian architecture or art on Persian expression. American and British courts do not refer to Indian law or judgements. The names of Indian scientists do not populate science textbooks. It is all one way traffic.
To be successful and worthwhile, reflection on this has to turn away from simplistic pronouncements about the cruelty of India’s various invaders and betrayals by self centred insiders to allow for an interrogation of the structure of Indian civilization.
What factors allowed for the growth of rule of law and democracy in medieval England,but prevented the same in medieval India ? Such institutions did not look on the horizon even in Hindu kingdoms of Kerala and Assam. Given Fukuyama’s contention that the appearance of these institutions is linked ultimately to Indo-European culture (does this explain the relatively smooth acceptance of democracy in India versus the resistance it got everywhere else ?), it is important to understand how little England got there before us.
What made the native Indian elites at the time of the Delhi Sultanate and the later Mughal Sultanate acquiesce to Persian as the official language ? One of the first actions of the Maratha Empire was the anointment of Sanskrit and Marathi as official languages. So if Indic options were available, especially Sanskrit, why did the Rajputs, Brahmins and Vaishyas not push for its position as the Sultanate’s official language ? After all the Turkic Qing dynasty in China maintained Mandarin as the official language. It is befuddling to imagine that they did not foresee the consequences this would bring.
The conventional response to such questions has revolved around caste as a dehumanizing and denationalizing force. But we know that caste did not play
The awakened Indian lives in an odious, depressing world today. A new generation of elite and middle class appears to have virtually no interest in India beyond superficial cliches. A lifeline was thrown to Indian civilization by Gandhi and the Independence Movement.
Setting the ground straight on the Indian economy
“I could see some parts of the coastal peninsula approaching Thai levels at best”
Some comments in our discussion threads necessitate a deconstruction of the Indian economy.
In my opinion, a good place to start analyzing national economies is nominal industrial output. This is a good measure of the level and depth of industrial prowess of a country. The prices of industrial goods also tend to be less sensitive to locale, than services.
As an example of the usefulness of this measure, consider the economies of Italy and Germany. Seeing the number of German brands around the world, the reputation of German engineering and more recently, the exodus of highly educated Italians from their country, we have a strong intuition that the German economy is stronger than the Italian one. Yet the difference between Germany and Italy in terms of overall PPP GDP per capita does not seem very large. However, restricting to the nominal industrial output, the German output is more than twice that of Italy.
Ayushmaan Khurana and the self image of North Indians
Indian film actor and singer Ayushmann Khurana has made quite a name for himself with a string of quirky, off the beaten track Hindi movies. Khurana (5 million twitter followers) doesnt have the star power of megastars like Shah Rukh Khan and Akshay Kumar (38 and 32 m twitter followers), or even more recent stars like Ranveer Singh (13 m) and Varun Dhawan (11 m).
But he has now delivered a string of superhits, starting with Dum Laga ke Haisha, Bareilly Ki Barfi, Shubh Mangal Saavdhan, Badhaai Ho, Article 15, Dream Girl and most recently, Bala since 2015. This is a better ratio than any other actor or actress in Indian cinema. Due to the low cost of his movies, some claim that Khurana has made more money for distributors in India in the last two years than all Bollywood stars in the last two decades.
It is important to note that unlike Indian movies of the past, the role of the protagonist in these movies is not ‘heroic’. Khurana, in all these movies, is playing a rooted, local role, not some generic ‘larger than life’ hero. Apart from Dream Girl, Khurana’s name indicates that the role is that of a ‘UP Brahmin’, although his Brahminness is not central to the movie’s plot.
The actresses in these movies are Bhumi Pednekar (Marathi), Kriti Sanon (Punjabi), Sanya Malhotra (Punjabi), Nusrat Bharucha (Gujarati) and Yami Gautam (Garwhali). Like Khurana (Punjabi), none of them trace their last name to Uttar Pradesh.
I find it interesting that Bollywood cannot find local UP actors to represent what it thinks are genuine UP roles. I also find the insistence on the protagonists being Brahmin interesting.
My own explanation for this phenomenon is that UP is one of the least urbanized states in India. India’s major urban centres, even Delhi, do not have a majority of Hindi origin people. Actors typically come from urban backgrounds, and other linguistic groups have seen more urbanization for historical reasons.
This creates an interesting dichotomy where these urbanites grow up thinking that their nation has a certain core, which they do not know intimately. But since Bollywood does claim to represent the nation (“Bharat ke dil main ek gaon, Ramgarh”), these non Hindi actors have to represent something UP. It seems that the imaginary of UP in their eyes is of Brahmins, Muslims and crime.
Jamshedpur and Pittsburgh, the difference a knowledge centre can make
Does the world need another factory ? Economic options for India.
Politically and strategically, economic decoupling from the PRC has become an imperative for India.
We were always colonized
Not just that, we were always colonizers. The logic of de-colonizing makes little sense and replaces real conversations about the distribution of power in a society with pretensions of ameliorating imaginary ethnic injuries.
Does Indian history matter ?
Across the internet, and even in the broader public discourse, Indian history is a point of contention in a way that not many other civilization’s past is. Whether it is the question of early Central intrusions and their links (or lack thereof) to Hindu synthesis and propagation, or the era of Muslim political rule, narratives of history in India carry get emotional valence.
However, there is a bigger question here. In what way does Indian history matter ? The past is literally that, the past. To matter, history must continually provide relatable reference points and rich contexts to understand the present and beyond. On first glance, as a record of a civilization that failed to industrialize and reach enlightenment values autonomously, Indian history might not seem to hold much intrinsic value.
Where Indian history becomes more relevant for today and tomorrow is when it starts responding in a innovative and creative ways in response to the industrialized West. There is a reason why the Indian Constitution out enlightens most Western founding documents. This response comes from India’s specific cultural and moral values, but these attributes are totally divorced from genetic profiles and who had the throne in Delhi, when. They rely instead on deeper currents of folklore
The tragedy of Pakistan
Pakistan has spent its entire life trying to be an answer to an Indian fringe. The end result has been chronic political instability, retarded economic growth and shambolic human development. In its deluded and inexplicable search to be an answer to extreme right wing Hindus, Pakistan has been egged on by both the US and China. The superpowers have had their own strategic and political interests at heart, and Pakistan has been a victim of their cynical and self serving maneuvers.
Pakistan should take a leaf out of its Muslim counterparts to think about its relations with India. UAE, Saudi, Oman and Bangladesh all have excellent relations with India. Indonesia, the largest Muslim country on earth provides visa on arrival to Indians (but not to Pakistanis). Iran trades with India in Indian rupees. Afghan cricketers are feted as heroes in the IPL. All this is with a right wing party in power in Delhi for nearly a decade. Yet Pakistan clings to its self anointed role as the shield to India’s right wing.
Pakistan’s own history should remind it that extreme political movements (left, right, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Communist etc) eventually become a bigger problem for the communities that breed them.
India’s lost decades: A failure of discourse
Plot of world gdp growth versus Indian gdp growth
There is much historical work on the Indian economy under British rule. The top line summary is indicated in the graph above, while the world grew quickly from 1800 to 1950 (per capita gdp more than tripling), India stayed exactly where it was. Plenty of reasons have been offered, but India’s troubles in this time come down to two reasons:
- A lack of natural resources necessary for industrial growth.
- British racial attitudes that deemed Indians unworthy of human investment.
The period I am more interested is the time between 1965 and 1982. The world experienced a surge in output in this time. South Korea went from around the same GDP per capita as India, to 7 times India’s output.