Passages to India: Hindu Culture and Western Minds
Miller, Stephen
"Passages to India: Hindu Culture and Western Minds" The Western reformer's distaste for tradition and love of efficiency...
...Eliot ends "The Waste Land" with "Shantih shantih shantih," implying that only Hindu prayer can help Western civilization renew itself...
...Perhaps Americans flock to China because they like package tours, whereas in India they are allowed to fend for themselves, roaming where they see fit...
...for it is obvious that Naipaul thinks very few Indians will have the strength to slay the past...
...According to Milton Singer, Indians "look on modernization as a cultural process of traditionalization, ' in which the new is turned into something old, and not as a cultural process that makes something new out of that which is old...
...India, Dumont says, is still totally informed by Hinduism, still a society where the castes are present and untouchability effective, although untouchability has been declared illegal...
...The very word "disciplined," moreover, recalls those who praised the discipline of Mussolini's Italian "experiment" as well as the discipline of Stalin's Soviet "experiment...
...There is no similar rush, however, to see the Indian "experiment"—the experiment, that is, in democracy, for India has been democratic about as long as China has been totalitarian...
...There are no halfway houses...
...In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke had King Lear in mind when he railed against the French revolutionaries for trying to smash the past...
...In his seminal essay, "Beyond Tradition and Modernity in Madras," Singer points out that Indian traditionalists continually "find evidence in the Vedas and other scriptures for the airplane or nuclear fission or fusion...
...Although an uncomplicated individual, Amundsen could nonetheless imagine the larger efforts of exploration...
...And the range of India's eating habits is, according to a New York Times report, "as wide as the difference between a Norwegian breakfast and a Greek dessert...
...Indian tradition is like the Bible...
...Traditional India," Singer says, "is not a monolithic and immovable accumulation of immemorial customs and beliefs blocking the road to progress...
...Eric Stokes, the English historian, has said that when Western intellectuals write about India they "unwittingly generate mystification and nonsense by allowing fixed, abstract models to be projected into the popular consciousness, while failing to observe the extreme mobility and ready intermixing of different states of mind within and between whole cultures or single individuals...
...As Veit says: By his own account, he was frustrated on his first day in office when he found that the staff recommendation on every industrial license application on his desk was "Do not approve...
...by no effort of will could I keep them back...
...either one is imprisoned in tradition or one escapes from its confinement...
...One can understand why most Americans prefer to go to China, but what about the Westerner's figurative "passage" to India...
...The Congress government has tried to shut my mouth and therefore the Congress loses my vote...
...Naipaul's and Harrington's prescriptions, in fact, have about them the musty odor of age, recalling those of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, who also despised Hinduism...
...About China, of course, there is no way of knowing...
...The question is superfluous...
...He wakes up at four in the morning and for three hours says his prayers, does his yoga exercises, and makes his ablutions...
...Comprehensive planning is not the answer to the problems of India's poor...
...Indeed, as Clifford Geertz, the contemporary anthropologist, has said: "Undirected by culture patterns—by organized systems of significant symbols—man's behavior would be virtually ungovernable, a mere chaos of pointless acts and exploding emotions, his experience virtually shapeless...
...Dumont's observation is probably accurate, but it obscures a far more interesting point—namely, that extensive modernization has taken place within the confines of tradition...
...India is, in fact, like a federated Western Europe—a state composed of many different nations, from the Bengalis of the Northeast to the Tamils of the South, each with its distinctive cultural and literary traditions...
...Once people saw how foolish their mode of dress was, they would exchange it for something more sensible...
...The upshot of Naipaul's cultural determinism is a sense of gloom about India that is not justified...
...Efficiency," Lord Curzon proclaimed, "has been our gospel, the keynote of our administration...
...Naipaul continually applies his generalizations to the particularities of Indian life...
...Forced to tear himself free from Hindu traditions, the Indian would lose his bearings.aine and Lyall were also troubled by the reformers' militant sense of superiority—their assumption that Indians were children who required the stern but fair guardianship of the English...
...Since Indian culture was so benighted, it was inappropriate to ask Indians if they agreed with the "reforms" to be inflicted upon them...
...we can take from it as many meanings as we like...
...Ceremony's a name for the rich horn, And custom for the spreading laurel tree...
...Living as he does in a totalitarian state, he knows that if he is asked a pointed question he must smile and say what he has been taught to say...
...Perhaps writers can make it new, as Ezra Pound said, but countries attempt to do so at their peril...
...They left their villages, but did they leave their traditions behind—all of them...
...Although the reformers were not racists in the maleficent post-Nazi sense of the term, they definitely held Indians in low esteem...
...India, for them, is a sacred mystery, whereas for most Westerners it is a hopeless muddle...
...According to this line of reasoning, tradition determines conduct in rigid ways, and its encompassing nature precludes significant change without a radical break with the past...
...On December 7, 1911, the great Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had gone farther south than any man before him...
...In his journal of the expedition, which would carry him and his party, finally, to the South Pole, Amundsen paid proper tribute to Sir Ernest Shackleton, who "had planted his country's flag so infinitely nearer to the goal than any of his precursors...
...The reformers alternated between an excessive faith that it would be easy to eradicate the blight of Hinduism, given the basic uniformity of human nature, and an excessive despair that such efforts would come to naught, given the perverseness of the Indian character...
...Thus tradition can never accommodate itself to modernity...
...The travelers to China praise the regime for helping the Chinese people, yet have they ever asked a Chinese peasant what he has to say about the revolutionary reforms...
...Rich in socialist rhetoric, the bureaucracy stifles private initiative to such a degree that "private businessmen, more and more unwilling and unable to cope with government controls, have reverted to extralegal devices...
...or the past will kill...
...and (3) that because Tamil Nadu favored industrialization, when officials could not approve private investment proposals, they should recommend alternative projects which could be approved...
...Charles Horner Arabs in Antarctica The Nordic explorer gives way to the Third World entrepreneur...
...With its 14 major languages, 875 dialects, and 22 federated states, India is a state pulled into being by the English, who united the subcontinent by crisscrossing it with railroads and imposing on it both standardized administrative procedures and the English language, which remains the language of national administration although fewer than 3 percent of the population can understand it...
...Unlike the Indian peasant, the Chinese peasant would never risk being frank with a foreigner...
...Even Indianophiles accept such a notion of India...
...For them, though, the disorder of traditional India contains a higher kind of order, one that is an antidote to the this-worldly order of China and the West...
...How can the mind take hold of such a country...
...Gandhi was a casualty of India's thirty-year-old tradition [emphasis mine] of elections by secret ballot...
...they had left it behind in the villages...
...9 / AUG./SEPT...
...In India," they say, "the blurring of lines between natural and voluntary structures has placed her associational life on a footing not too different from that of modern nations...
...Far from being suffocating, the Indian past is rich in possibility, since Hinduism, as many writers have pointed out, is the world's most eclectic religion...
...11, NO...
...We have seen," Mill said in his History of India, "that by a system of priestcraft, built upon the most enormous and tormenting superstition that ever harassed and degraded any portion of mankind, their [the Indians' 1 minds were enchained more intolerably than their bodies...
...Yet if Hindu India is beyond most of us, civil India—the India of free elections, rule of law, freedom of the press—is not...
...As he said to a New York Times reporter: "I do not mind if my Government goes out of office because of prohibition...
...Although Venkateranam's approach was radically different from normal operating procedure, it was adopted while he was minister and is generally credited with having provided Tamil Nadu with an unsurpassed period of industrial progress...
...When the subcontinent was ruled by Englishmen preaching the gospel of efficiency, the economy suffered...
...Recognizing the hegemony of tradition does not mean that tradition—like a complacent, all-knowing guru—has ready answers to all the questions modernization raises...
...the shorter they are, the better...
...The trouble is: Naipaul accepts their version of India as the real India...
...If some Englishmen thought Mill and Bentham went too far, 6 The American Spectator August/ September 1978 M fearing that Indian society would be disrupted and demoralized if the English intervened in all areas of Indian life, most Englishmen still believed that only they could deliberate about what was best for India...
...After all, were they not "versed in the universal principles of legislation and free from local prejudice and interest" ? So Bentham argued, justifying his utilitarian approach to English policy in India...
...In this view tradition becomes a mystical force—hypostatized into an all-powerful entity, a savage god that continually "wounds" an entire civilization...
...According to Peter Berger, the West urgently needs to make contact with "the cosmological imagination of the Indian mind...
...In this way," Singer says, "its present acceptance into the society is culturally validated...
...According to Naipaul, some Indians do manage to break with the past, rejecting the siren song of Hindu resignation...
...By finding a sacred text to "support" such modern developments, what is new in India is given a local habitation and name within the structure of Indian tradition...
...We learn, for example, that India "taught the vanity of all action," and that the various doctrines of Hinduism, especially the notion of karma, have had a crippling effect on Indian life because they discourage all attempts at self-betterment...
...Amundsen's later achievements in Antarctica were destined for submersion in the tragic fate of the British explorer, Captain Robert Falcon Scott...
...As Nirmal Verma said in the last issue of Seminar, an Indian monthly forced to stop publication during the Emergency: "All projects of 'revolutionary reform' may become instruments of oppression if the people for whom they are designed are deprived of the right to judge and comment upon them in the light of their experience...
...What begins as rationalist dissection ends as quasi-biological mystique...
...As J. Fitzjames Stephen said, it was England's task to introduce "the essential parts of European civilization into a country densely peopled, grossly ignorant, unenergetic, fatalistic, indifferent to most of what we regard as the evils of life, and preferring the repose of submitting to them to the trouble of encountering and trying to remove them...
...Otherwise, he says, the human race will eventually impose upon itself "a dreadful sameness of vision, in a global pseudo-civilization dictated by economics and politics...
...Forster asks, implying that India is beyond understanding...
...Yet India cannot be divided so easily along rural and urban lines, for India's agriculture has been affected by modernization, and the country's food output has increased by 50 percent in the last ten years...
...Having absorbed innumerable elements from the many foreign cultures that have occupied India over the centuries, Indian tradition has managed to accommodate itself to significant change while still maintaining a recognizable continuity...
...Indians, the reformers assumed, could only begin to govern themselves after they reached the level of enlightenment already attained by the English...
...Some traditionalists will resist all change...
...Once he had come upon a mailman from the Hudson Bay Company cheerily walking alone in the midst of nowhere...
...Towards the end of the century, however, they met with strong resistance from some English intellectuals who were troubled by the attempt to export English law and custom to India...
...American writers have been especially susceptible to India worship, from Thoreau and Emerson to Eliot and Ginsberg...
...Indian traditions, in fact, are in some ways very favorable to democracy...
...Nor does it mean that tradition should be venerated...
...By posing the question in this way, Naipaul has made the Indian "problem" intractable...
...Scorning those who bow down to spiritual India, Naipaul accuses them of sinking into "the stupor of meditation...
...But one could easily turn Mill's explanation around and say that the Indian's cluster of nasty characteristics "explained" his predilection for Hinduism...
...Unaccommodated man is an ignis fatuus, a figment of the rationalist's overheated imagination...
...All too often "tradition" and "modernity" are invoked as mutually exclusive terms...
...collected and congratulated each other...
...In India's Second Revolution, a comprehensive study of India's economic development during the past 100 years, Lawrence A. Veit says that India's current economic growth rate of 3.3 percent per annum is a big improvement over the 0.7 percent growth rate estimated for the first half of the twentieth century—and, Veit adds, is "even more impressive in light of the economic stagnation India experienced during the period 1800-1950...
...Not realizing that the principles of classical political economy were not perfectly applicable to India's peasant society, the philosophic reformers rushed headlong into reform...
...Thus Michael Harrington, like Naipaul, insists in a recent book that "many of the truly holy and profound institutions of India should be, and must be, smashed...
...India, these writers argue, is a land famous for its oriental despotism—a land, as Wolpert says, whose "patient, tolerant, long-suffering populace has been inured by millennia of cultural continuity to accept authority as part of the divine order (dharma), which was law and religion combined...
...In any case, English reforms were not universally disliked by Indians...
...but smashed...
...In the minds of many Westerners, these two Asian giants assume quasi-allegorical meanings: China stands for an ordered future, India for a disordered past...
...During the past 150 years, Western ideas and traditions have continually played an important part in the debate about political change in India...
...Born into debt, many peasants die bequeathing that debt to their children...
...But exactly what, we want to know, did they leave behind...
...Mystery or muddle—to use two words that reverberate throughout E.M...
...There are many rooms in the mansion of Indian tradition, a tradition that is Moslem as well as Hindu, for India has the fourth largest Moslem population in the world...
...Even John Stuart Mill, the strenuous defender of liberty, said that there was no practical alternative to ruling India other than a pure and enlightened despotism...
...these very well...
...Singer's essay explodes the simplistic and antithetical notions of tradition and modernity that we find in the writings of Mill, Bentham, Naipaul, Harrington, and countless others...
...According to Mill and Bentham, culture was like a clumsy mode of dress, one that hampered movement and prevented progress...
...Except for a determined few, the passage to traditional India will be too difficult for Westerners...
...The flag of Norway was planted, but "one gets out of the way of protracted ceremonies in those regions...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL...
...Indians were too far gone down the road of Hindu superstition to know what was good for them...
...It centers on the experience of R. Venkateranam, after he became industries minister in Tamil Nadu...
...III Speculations about tradition and modernity in India take on a certain edge when they are brought to bear upon India's democratic experiment, an experiment that was interrupted a few years ago by Indira Gandhi's proclamation of emergency rule...
...II There is nothing new about wanting to smash the past...
...That said, we must be careful not to let cultural determinism slip in through the back door, taking a rigid view both of what accommodation signifies and what it means to be "directed" by cultural patterns...
...Forster's A Passage to India—India is summed up as a strange land whose teeming millions practice a way of life that is thick with distinctly non-Western traditions, summed up in peculiarly static ways that do little justice to its complexity and dynamics...
...Thus Robespierre tried to keep the Revolution under control by creating a neo-Roman tradition of civil religion...
...In short, democracy was not an Indian tradition, and there was only the slightest chance that it could flourish in India...
...But, as Veit makes clear, "if India had managed the resources that were available for its economic development with less doctrinaire concern for socialism...
...Yeats notwithstanding, some customs and ceremonies do not give birth to innocence and beauty: suttee, for example, and the practice—common until fairly recently in South India—whereby untouchables had to wear bells, like cattle, to warn high-caste Hindus of their approach...
...Withal Desai is committed to democracy...
...And the Chinese government obligingly provides them with guided tours for their edification and illumination...
...Pressing English reforms upon India, Sir Alfred Lyall warned, would promote rapid disintegration, "breaking down all local forms of independent political life, draining all authority to a common center, and pounding down the multifarious races and institutions into one uniform and atomized mass...
...One must always put in a good—if feeble—word for it...
...Mill and Bentham, as well as Naipaul and Harrington, bristle with impatience and exasperation when they write about India...
...Both were confident that what Bentham called his "science of legislation," with its "universal, immutable laws as valid as those of the physical sciences," would remove India from the throes of irrational custom...
...Paul's...
...In China, no doubt, the trains the Westerners take run on time, whereas in India, as we know from Paul Theroux's account in The Great Railway Bazaar, the trains never run on time...
...By abolishing traditions, Burke said, the revolutionaries were rudely tearing off "the decent drapery of life," leaving only our "naked, shivering nature," leaving the French people not only unconnected with the past but unconnected with anything...
...Traditional India flourishes in the country's 500,000 villages, where 72 percent of the population works the land in ways that have remained the same for generations...
...its development would have been faster and even the poor would have participated in the growth...
...But traditions, as we have seen, work—or, rather, change—in mysterious and devious ways...
...Commenting on Indira Gandhi's electoral defeat, Ved Mehta says: "Mrs...
...It is not considered proper, however, to deprecate democracy...
...Sounding very much like Mill and Bentham, Naipaul quotes with approval a New Delhi psychotherapist who speaks of the Indian's "underdeveloped" ego and of the Indian's "childlike perception of reality...
...Yet, as with many attempts to do good, English reform of Indian tradition had its unintended bad effects...
...Indian traditions are not only extremely tenacious, they are also extremely flexible...
...And he does not subscribe to cant—common among literary intellectuals—about the evils of technology and industrialization...
...Yet his prescription for India suffers from a view of cultural change that resembles nothing so much as the cliches of old movie travelogues, in which the narrator harped on the way the old and the new stood side by side...
...it is a world view that celebrates resignation: One accepts one's fate as just within a cosmic scheme, hoping that in the next reincarnation things will be better...
...The tears forced their way to my eyes...
...They book passage to India in order to find or renew their spiritual selves, cleansing themselves of the so-called materialism of the West...
...The laurel tree, however, is an imperfect metaphor, for it makes the process of change in India seem all too benign and free from conflict...
...and the more traditional one is, the less chance one has of successfully adapting to the demands of the modern world...
...All he knows is that in India "the past has to be seen to be dead...
...In any case, all the world's major religions have a strong element of fatality and resignation in their doctrine, so any study of India's supposedly acute sense of resignation and its damaging effect upon Indian life needs to be cross-cultural in order to be convincing...
...Unlike Ginsberg and most literary intellectuals, Naipaul appreciates the entrepreneurial spirit, a trait he thinks Indians must acquire if the country is ever going to allay the poverty of its masses...
...it is the India of steel mills, nuclear reactors, and a growing electronics industry...
...If India, the United States, and Japan are the three most populous democracies in the world, then we cannot say that democracy is still only a Western tradition...
...and none recommended anything more revolutionary than a few reforms within [emphasis Hiro's] the existing political-administrative framework," he is arguing in favor of one Western tradition—the Marxian socialist one—and rejecting another, the liberal democratic one...
...If Hindu traditions were smashed, power would concentrate at the center of Indian society...
...Indeed, this was to prove the highlight of Amundsen's expedition, with the Pole itself something of an anticlimax...
...Thus most travelers to China throw in a qualifying sentence or two after they have recounted how successful China has been in conquering disease, famine, etc...
...Even those intent on destroying traditions eventually come to realize that new traditions must be put in their place...
...Although he and Ginsberg disagree on the value of meditation, they both think that India is defined by such spirituality...
...He had sought a Northwest Passage in 1905, and had trudged through the northern polar regions...
...By now democracy has been absorbed by Indian tradition, so that it is no longer regarded as something exotic and foreign...
...He understated the immensity of their achievement...
...Yet this way of reading a civilization is very misleading, for it implies that Hindu notions determine Indian conduct in clear-cut, definable ways...
...and totalitarianism, which makes oriental despotism pale by comparison, is surely a Western invention...
...However, it was Hinduism and not the Indian's innate character that was the culprit—the reason why, according to James Mill, Indians were insincere, unfeeling, dissembling, treacherous, mendacious, cowardly, conceited, and unclean...
...Berger, it strikes me, is asking too much of the West—asking us to appreciate and come to understand a culture that will always remain mysterious, and perhaps unsympathetic...
...Fewer than 7 percent of the population knows an Indian language other than its native tongue...
...But "unaccommodated" does not adequately describe these industrious ex-villagers who are making a modest attempt to better themselves in difficult circumstances...
...But traditions cannot be created by fiat—unless, that is, they are enforced by the terror of a totalitarian state...
...As Theodore C. Sorensen says: "We can and should admire new China's determined and disciplined rate of economic and social progress without pretending to endorse the philosophy and system under which this progress is occurring...
...A particular example of the bureaucracy's mindlessness is worth quoting in full...
...Indira Gandhi, on the other hand, is most definitely a Westernized Indian, yet she was responsible for the Emergency...
...2) that government should explain its disapprovals because, even though this would give businessmen more grounds to quarrel with official decisions, it would help them to understand the state's policies and submit more acceptable applications in the future...
...Far from being at war with modernization, traditions in India legitimize change...
...The rationalist enthusiasms of the reformers often turned sour because the reformers did not acknowledge the hegemony of culture—did not even accept the very fact of culture...
...Naipaul's India: A Wounded Civilization...
...1978 Stephen Miller Passages to India: Hindu Culture and Western Minds The Western reformer's distaste for tradition and love of efficiency would destroy India's democratic culture...
...Indians were, in the main, to be educated, not exploited...
...If this were the case, then Moraji Desai, the current Prime Minister, would hanker to be an oriental despot, for he is very much an "Indian" Indian, having made his first trip abroad at the age of sixty-two...
...Despotism is as much a Western tradition as an Eastern one...
...No other moment of the whole trip affected me like this...
...Thus Louis Dumont, in an influential work of structural anthropology entitled Homo Hierarchicus, argues that the overall framework of Indian society has not changed...
...Scott's sur10 The American Spectator August/ September 1978...
...Henry Maine argued that such reforms could only be effective if they were rooted in the soil of a civilization's distinctive history and institutions...
...In this book, a record of impressions gleaned from a recent trip to India, The American Spectator August/ September 1978 5 Naipaul sees Indian life through the lens of some time-worn generalizations about Indian civilization...
...But a deeper reason, I suspect, obtains: India is not worthy of contemplation or inspection because it conjures up visions of beggars sleeping on the streets of Calcutta...
...Culture, as Geertz says, "is not just an ornament of human existence...but an essential condition for it...
...Nonviolently, persuasively, rationally smashed...
...Nor is the answer a complete break with the past—with traditions that enable Indians to organize politically so thatthey can effectively question the decisions of a massive state bureaucracy...
...For them the past was dead...
...We have no corroborating words from the men themselves...
...and there will always be conflicting interpretations of the ways in which certain aspects of modernity "fit" into the tradition...
...One way of beginning to understand India is to recognize its diversity...
...Naipaul may be right to criticizewhat he calls the self-satisfaction of Gandhiism, with its "meaningless exhortations to return to the true religion," but he is wrong to assume that this version of the Indian tradition is the Indian tradition...
...It is as if someone had contended that the anti-intellectual moralizing of a particular fundamentalist sect in the West revealed the wounded nature of Judeo-Christian civilization...
...Won't these people ever learn, they seem to say, implying at the same time that they cannot learn...
...And the task of educating Indians to see the foolishness of their traditions was quite simple, given the fact that human nature was basically "as plain," Mill said, "as the road from Charing Cross to St...
...They reached the Pole in January 1912 only to realize that they had lost the race...
...But the weakness of most explanations of India stems more from the explanatory terms themselves than from the way they are applied...
...The British government, Lord Curzon said, stood for the interests of "the Indian poor, the Indian peasant, the patient, humble, silent millions," but the British government's policy tended to chain the peasant to the land, a fate that many Indian peasants still endure, for peasant indebtedness is a major problem in India today...
...Most Englishmen thought that English efficiency could put the Indian house in order, bringing the greatest happiness to the greatest number of Indians...
...There are now enough food reserves to withstand several bad harvests...
...they saw themselves at the beginning of things: unaccommodated men making a claim on their land for the first time, and out of chaos evolving their own philosophy of community and self-help...
...Or, as Stanley Wolpert said in A New History of India: "Parliamentary government, democratic elections, freedom of speech and of the press, and the rule of law were all part of the gloss of Western modernization introduced in the last phase of British rule to a civilization that found them strangely exotic and foreign...
...Disproving the widely-held notion that modernization inevitably leads to the disintegration of traditional values, Dumont says that in India "there has been change in the society and not change of the society" [emphasis Dumont's], the point being that traditional values still guide the conduct of Indians...
...Efficiency...
...The fact that the poor, in general, have not participated in India's economic growth can be blamed, perhaps, on the continuing problem of untouchability in India...
...The relation of tradition to everyday life may be clearer in India than it is in the West, but it is not so clear that one can say, as Naipaul does, that in traditional India the simplest ideas of human possibility are extinct...
...In The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India, Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph argue that India's caste system has contributed more to the realization of political democracy than to its inhibition...
...Yet the new order never abolishes the past...
...As a result, the isolated and demoralized Indian would have difficulty defending his particular interests against a "public interest" proclaimed by a ruling elite—one that was Westernized and believed that it knew what was best for "Indian" Indians...
...The passage rings false, especially the word "unaccommodated," which recalls King Lear's speech in the storm...
...This self-consciousness may lead to increased conflict about how, in Singer's words, "to continue converting the events of history into assimilable cultural traditions...
...Like the other philosophic reformers, Mill thought enlightened despotism the most expeditious way of civilizing India and aiding its impoverished masses...
...t would be simplifying matters to say that state planning in the name of efficiency has caused all of India's economic problems...
...Although Dumont, unlike Naipaul and Harrington, is a sympathetic observer of Indian culture, he too sees India as a society locked into its traditions, one in which Homo hierarchicus still remains the governing notion...
...Harrington, like Naipaul, forgets that civilizations lose touch with their past either because they are demoralized, having been brutally conquered, or because they are forced to do so by a totalitarian regime...
...A week later, Amundsen and his party reached the South Pole...
...Moreover, even the most die-hard defenders of the worth and distinctiveness of Indian traditions would have a hard time disagreeing with the English abolition, in 1829, of suttee, the custom that required Hindu widows to cremate themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres...
...During the past four years, one of the more fashionable pastimes of America's elites has been to make a trip to China...
...And why did they cling so tenaciously to their tradition, rejecting the Western traditions the English were so eager to offer them...
...The Chinese system is efficient, whereas the Indian system is not...
...But the question of whether Indian tradition can accommodate itself to democracy is a secondary one for most Westerners...
...it merely manufactures its own crude and distorted version of the past...
...Politicians, educators, scholars, government officials, doctors: All want to see how the Chinese "experiment" works, how China is coping with agriculture, transportation, health care, industrialization, education...
...Contemplating this continuous process, one thinks of the spreading laurel tree in Yeats' "A Prayer for My Daughter": How but in custom and in ceremony Are innocence and beauty born...
...India's traditionalismis rather a built-in adaptive mechanism for making changes...
...The rising educated classes approved of them because they reduced the power of nobles and priests...
...Foreign elements are continually being integrated into the culture—legitimized by being turned into something old...
...Modernization, moreover, brings with it a self-consciousness about tradition, so that more often than not the contemporary Indian chooses to what extent and in what ways he will be directed by tradition...
...The main question is whether a backward and impoverished country like India can afford democracy...
...When Dilip Hiro, in Inside India Today, criticizes the books he has read on India because none, he says, was "highly critical of the present sociopolitical system...
...If the China enthusiasts think about India at all, they dismiss it as a hopeless muddle, a society mired in the past, one that needs something stronger than democracy in order to lift it into the present...
...For why, among all the peoples of the world, were only Indians Hindus...
...As he said: "Just because a man is poor and maybe cannot read does not mean that he cares nothing about his human rights...
...India, however, is an open society, and we can make some assessment of its efficiency or lack thereof...
...one can be just about anything...
...Yet the problem dissolves once we realize that there is no such thing as the Indian past...
...Organic change does not mean that change happens naturally, effortlessly...
...And because drinking liquor, he says, is against Hindu tradition, he has made the banning of alcoholic beverages a principal goal of his government...
...These people are not so much observed by Naipaul as made to serve as figures in his melodramatic allegory about the Indian past and present...
...Before condemning as colossal humbug the complacent ethnocentricity of England's "civilizing mission" in India, we should keep in mind that the very highmindedness of the English prevented them, in general, from treating Indians in the way the Belgians treated the Congolese...
...Since there is no official definition and interpretation of Hindu tradition, there is room for interpreters to look for ways of adapting Indian traditions to changing needs and circumstances...
...A devout Hindu, he avoids modern medicines and has never taken an injection...
...Although many intellectuals, both Indian and Western, strongly protested against the Emergency, many also resigned themselves to it by arguing that, as Naipaul himself said, "the freedoms that came to independent India...were alien freedoms...
...Even those who acknowledge and celebrate the complexity of India often make a mystique of that complexity...
...The Chinese divulge what they want to divulge, so that it is absurd of Sorensen to speak of China's "disciplined rate of economic and social progress" when he hasn't the slightest idea what that rate is...
...The extent of its acceptance can be gauged by the remarks of an Indian peasant who, I imagine, has never left India and is not in the least bit Westernized...
...Naipaul's view of India is as one-dimensional as Ginsberg' s. To do Naipaul justice, the views he espouses are distinctive and refreshing...
...Arguing that the Emergency would, among other things, make India more efficient, Indira Gandhi seemed to be borrowing a line from Lord Curzon—another "enlightened" despot...
...But unaccommodated man, as King Lear himself said, is only "a poor, bare, forked animal," nothing more than a beast...
...Scott's party had set out from its Antarctic base almost the same time as had Amundsen's...
...Naipaul has confounded his distaste for one version of the Indian past with a distaste for the whole of Indian civilization...
...We reckoned now that we were at the Pole....After we had halted, we Charles Horner is Senior Legislative Assistant to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York...
...Such actions, Burke implied, were not only shameful, they were also doomed to fail because the collapse of tradition would not result in a new order based on reason but in a vast disorder, one where wild men acted unpredictably...
...In other words, democracy is a luxury in countries like China and India...
...Amundsen had written: "I stood looking after him as he disappeared from view, and I thought, if you got together a few more men of his stamp, you could get to the moon...
...Despite his remarks about India's wounded civilization, Naipaul at times seems to be quarreling less with Indian tradition in general than with certain aspects of contemporary Hinduism—especially the version of Hinduism espoused by some of Gandhi's disciples, which Naipaul dismisses as "religious self-display, a juggling with nothing, a liberation from constructive thought and political burdens...
...Recognizing the hegemony of tradition merely means acknowledging that Indian tradition is a capacious mansion under whose roof most debates about change in India are likely to take place—unless, that is, the mansion is smashed by those who prefer the supposed efficiency of a Leninist or Stalinist model of change...
...But such mindless optimism is less insidious than the simplistic pessimism of those who see the past as the enemy of the present...
...We were further south than any human being had been...
...And the Indian economy suffers now to the extent that it is conThe•American Spectator August/ September 1978 9 trolled by a bloated state bureaucracy that launches—in the name of socialist efficiency—many hastily conceived crash programs...
...Yet rarely do they trouble themselves to find out whether their confident pronouncements about China's efficiency and India's inefficiency are accurate...
...Those who gape at the Chinese experiment forget that India, the world's most populous democracy, deserves our interest, allegiance, and support...
...Summing up the English policy of changing Indian rural society from one where patrimonial relations of status obtained to one where impersonal contracts held sway, Eric Stokes says: "The celerity with which landed property could be transferred, the certainty surrounding its tenure, the facilities for mortgage, all supported and executed by the courts, were undoubtedly instrumental in the rapid development of peasant indebtedness and the transfer of property titles to the moneylending classes...
...Describing a small community in the environs of Bombay, he says: "For the Sena men...the world was new...
...Applied heavy-handedly, without paying attention to the unique cultural landscape of India, the reforms would either not take hold or would take hold in disastrous ways, acting as a dissolving force...
...Stressing the uniqueness of India's traditions, cultural determinists often imply the more an Indian is rooted in Hindu tradition, the more likely he is to accept forms of authority that are not legitimized by democratic means...
...Lear was unaccommodated...
...And they were certain, moreover, that whatever laws they devised would be in the best interest of the Indian people...
...India's traditions are tenacious, but they are not hidebound—not impervious to foreign influences...
...Bentham and Mill took a radical approach to the question of how to administer India, a question that was on the minds of many English intellectuals during the nineteenth century, when England consolidated its position on the subcontinent...
...Just when they would attain that level, however, was a question that troubled only a handful of English intellectuals...
...How the word gladdens the hearts of so many intellectuals—both Western and Indian—who are impatient with the confusions of tradition and the delays of democracy...
...What this typical bit of legerdemain means is: China's political system is bad, but it has produced wonderful results, for the Chinese people are obviously much better off under this system than they would have been under any other...
...One could move into the future only by breaking decisively with the past...
...Like Yeats' laurel tree, Indian tradition is a living structure, rooting deep into the past while reaching out into the present...
...The usual way of understanding India, however, is not by describing its regional differences but by speaking of two Indias: traditional and modern...
...According to Naipaul, Hinduism means passivity and anti-intellectualism...
...The reformers' faith in an unanchored, ahistorical rationality was one with the faith of the French phdosophes, who invoked the light of reason to dispel the darkness of tradition, hoping thereby The American Spectator August/September 1978 7 that unaccommodated man—to use Naipaul' s word—would be able to take control of his life rather than remain a slave to custom...
...Naipaul, of course, disagrees with those Westerners who hold up India as a model of spirituality, anti-materialism, and self-discipline in contrast to the worldliness, acquisitiveness, and self-indulgence of the West...
...India's castes, which are not as rigidly defined as most Westerners assume, function the way the numerous voluntary associations in the United States function: organizing political power and channeling public opinion...
...If India has suffered from the impatient schemes of reformers, it has also—though to a lesser degree—suffered from the frozen visions of anthropologists, who often are on the alert only for cultural continuities and pay insufficient attention to the dynamics of change within tradition...
...India, however, confounds and bewilders, not only because the sight of so much poverty is shocking but also because, as Eric Stokes says, India remains a land "where different orders of civilization and material culture have not displaced one another successively but continue to live side by side...
...The three points he made to his staff on this occasion were (1) that surely some applications were acceptable as submitted or with minor modifications...
...It is as if an Englishman with a smattering of French, Spanish, and German were responsible for putting together an anthology entitled New Writing in Western Europe...
...he had lost everything: family, role, possessions...
...So much for being inured by millennia of cultural continuity...
...To be a Hindu," Ved Mehta has said, "one does not have to practice any particular set of observances, adhere to any particular beliefs, accept any particular metaphysics or any particular prophet, believe in any particular god, or, indeed, in any god....All gradations of beliefs, from the crudest to the most highly refined, have coexisted in Hinduism from the earliest times, making it the most syncretic religion in the world...
...By contrast, modern India, which finds its home in the cities, is technologically sophisticated—essentially self-sufficient in a broad range of manufactured goods, from trucks to hi-fis...
...The Chinese work hard to assure Westerners that their vast country has been composed into a harmonious whole...
...Rich in cloying good cheer, the language of such travelogues was glib and condescending in its assumption of a harmonious relationship between the two different worlds of the past and the present...
...In the attempt to return to their base camp, all five died...
...To gauge the difficulty of making sense of such a diverse country, one need only look at the introduction to a recent anthology, New Writing in India, in which the author admits that he knows only three Indian languages, and does not even know Stephen Miller will become a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in September...
...Yet it is no longer, I suspect, an open question for those Westerners who rush to China in order to marvel at its supposed efficiency...
...According to these voices of resignation, mixing Indian and Western traditions is like mixing oil and water...
...In their dealings with Western visitors, the Chinese are courteous, deferential, and ordered...
...Mahatma Gandhi, whose version of Hindu tradition Naipaul finds distasteful (as do many Indians), was perhaps more influenced by the ideas he 8 The American Spectator August/ September 1978 found in Thoreau, Emerson, Tolstoy, and Ruskin than by anything he found in Indian culture...
...Such is the lugubrious cultural determinism that informs V.S...
...Yet Naipaul is so preoccupied with India's "wounds" that he never considers the relation between tradition and modernity in other non-Western civilizations...
...One can be a practicing Hindu and be a capitalist entrepreneur or a holy guru...
...Naipaul, like Mill and Bentham, blames Hinduism, but most Indians persist in remaining Hindu...
...One thing, though, was continually clear to the reformers: Change could only happen outside tradition, for irrational custom stood in the way of rational change...
Vol. 11 • August 1978 • No. 9
