Abstract
This book has been marketed with an interesting red jacket which displays the National Emblem of the Republic of India which takes up almost half the front cover. The titlein white is printed in the middle of the jacket. The phrase ‘Righteous’ begins on the front-facing lion and gradually leaves it whereas ‘Republic’ is printed outside the emblem. This metaphor may well lead a post-modern reader to conclude that the Indian republic, like all republics, was and perhaps still is only inspired by notions of righteousness. Historical departure from such an ideal, as Sunil Khilnani demonstrated in The Idea of India in 1997, is usually the norm. On the back of Vajpeyi’s much-awarded and feted book’s jacket is a certificate by the iconic Columbia Professor Partha Chatterjee, which claims that her work ‘is original, acute, sensitive, frequently unconventional, and always delightfully readable’. Another testimonial, by Pratap Bhanu Mehta, sits below this and calls this book, ‘A thoroughly original, high-quality, and path-breaking contribution to Indian intellectual history.’ Mani Shankar Aiyer, in a fit of effusiveness, calls the author a ‘philosopher–historian’ (Financial Express) whereas Sudha Koul refers to this book’s underlining of the Indic texts as a source of India’s ‘collective selfhood’ (Wall Street Journal). The five chapters of the book identify, and discourse on, five male founders of modern India four of whom can be located as troubled savarna insiders of an ‘Indic’ tradition and the fifth a Dalit outsider. Two of the four are Bengalis and relatives. Unlike Ramchandra Guha’s acclaimed national bestseller Makers of Modern India (2010) this book neither includes a Muslim, nor Woman nor Dravid in its list of the founding fathers of modern India. Also missing are the Communists who have played a significant role in labour and peasant politics of modern India and certainly many people in Kerala, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh will testify to this. Mercifully Ambedkar features in Vajpeyi’s list but some of her observations on him will astound, if not openly anger, Dalit scholars. Further, the tenor of the book suggests that the notion ‘Indic’ does not really include Islamic influences on Indian history. Indeed Vajpeyi’s view of political Islam in India is summed up in the following words: ‘When it comes to India’s political tradition and its underlying puzzle of self, sovereignty, and their ligature, the rule of Muslim kings in the subcontinent for over a thousand years remains the blind spot’ (p. 34). Further, the author’s attempt to fabricate a conversation between Kabir and Gandhi towards the end of the book based on a contemporary painting tries to reconcile the irreconcilable in Indian history. A boat with so many founding fathers and such loud quarrelling is more likely to sink or remain adrift than reach any worthwhile destination. An artist’s expression of the pain felt by Muslims and secular Indians is not the same thing as a treatise on the foundations of modern India—moments of inspiration should not become flights of fancy.
The book chapters are organised around the Indic meanings of Sanskrit words. It seems the author knows Sanskrit which becomes the motif of the book. The meanings of these words are more speculative than historical in character. Gandhi is approached through the well-known route of Ahimsa and Swaraj—what is so feverishly original in this is difficult to see. Rabindranath Tagore’s philosophical inclination is portrayed through his reading of Kalidas as Viraha familiar to his followers and critics both. His well-known views on history and nationalism are repeated by the author. Abanindranath Tagore, the nephew of Rabindranath, makes the grade because of his art expressing Samvega. His ultra-tragic depiction of the death of Shah Jahan, which affected his poet uncle and the historian Jadunath Sarkar among others, and Bharat Mata is described in some rather pedestrian detail. This Bharat Mata, which is different from the one depicted by Bankim Chandra, though not ferocious is described an ‘icon of cultural nationalism’ (p. 144). Anyway, it does not take much to transform an icon into a political message of one’s preference. In comparison, historian Tanika Sarkar’s work on this issue is more original. Sometimes the copious references to the uncle in the chapter on the nephew give the impression that Chapter 3 is an extension of Chapter 2. If an artist like Abanindranath can be called a founding father of modern India why is Premchand, arguably the greatest Hindi writer of the first half of the twentieth century, missing from the list? The chapter on Jawaharlal Nehru, the ideal heir to Gandhi and the ruler of independent India, locates him in the context of Dharma and Artha and contains copious quotations from his works. This is ground well trodden. In sum the chapters often appear verbose and the prose is marred by the proliferation of phrases such as ‘It seems to me’, ‘To my mind’, ‘As I see it’, etc. The copy-editor should have paid attention to this. Such phrases reveal the deep-seated and defensive subjectivity of the author’s pronouncements in general.
The ‘talisman’ of this book is the work of the former Scottish Marxist philosopher-turned-Roman Catholic Alasdair MacIntyre, best known for his After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1984). According to MacIntyre, who features on several pages of the book and commands several entries in the bibliography, ‘a crisis in the self is a crisis in the tradition which has formed the self’ (p. xiv). The author asserts that every ‘tradition that lives a long and robust life, according to MacIntyre, must at some point face an epistemological crisis’ (p. xiii). This is not a new idea and was felt acutely by many Indians in the nineteenth century beginning perhaps with Ram Mohan Roy once called the father of modern India. Anyway, given the influence of MacIntyre on the author the book should have been called the virtuous republic! In fact, all traditions which come into contact with modernity are refashioned by it. The colonised subject lives in a state of perpetual epistemological crisis. In India this has happened at two levels. The dominant Indian castes felt inferior to the British but wanted to continue their domination of Indian society even as they gravitated towards an anti-colonial nationalism. As a consolation they felt superior to the lower castes. On the other hand, the dominated, especially shudra and the ati-shudra castes, tried their best to utilise British rule as an opportunity to overthrow savarna domination of their lives. They were held inferior both by the British and the savarna Indians. This dual burden of inferiority and discrimination was never experienced by four of the five founders of modern India located and eulogised by Vajpeyi. Such dual or even triple burdens were also felt by the women of India none of whose representatives features in this book father-obsessed book written by a woman.
In the context of the crisis of the Indian self it is simply a matter of getting carried away by one’s own subjective convictions to equate Gandhi with Galileo (p. 57). Galileo was a threat to theological tradition and therefore forced to recant by the Church. After all he posed a mortal threat to the rozi-roti of Christian superstitions. Gandhi posed no such threat to the savarna tradition in India and represented its most civilised and hegemonic form. The heliocentric ‘scientific revolution’ in Europe marked a decisive break with geocentric feudal tradition. Gandhi’s defence of the varnashramdharma and the practice of vaishnavism offers no such break. Even his hurriedly written manifesto Hind Swaraj was inspired by the anti-modern European romantic tradition and was published with Western certificates. According to this reviewer the epistemological break in Indian thought, if at all such a break need be identified, came with Phule, Ambedkar and Periyar who demolished the Brahmanical ideological basis of what had come to pass as the Indian tradition since the days of Warren Hastings and William Jones. Phule’s criticism of Kabir is well known and obviously missing from this book but it is one thing to appropriate Kabir to the Indic tradition and quite another to attempt the same with Ambedkar.
The chapter on Ambedkar in the book is the most problematic and comprises the Achilles heel of this verbose text. Of the five founders only Ambedkar was located outside the Indic tradition both literally and intellectually. According to him the Brahamanical tradition which sanctioned and sanctified the caste system was the source of Indian historical sickness. Chronic Dukha in Indian society was there because of a tradition which is fashionably called Indic by neo-Gandhians these days. Vajpeyi tries her best to show that Babasaheb’s conversion to Buddhism was his way of entering the Indic tradition. She underestimates the point that his creation of the Navayana was actually an attempt to purge Buddhism of its Brahmanical vestiges and make it appropriate to contemporary times. While writing of Ambedkar’s engagement with the Buddha and his rejection of renunciation (sanyaas) she says the following: ‘At the risk of making an ethical judgment against Ambedkar, I would go so far as to say that this is a failure of his imagination’ (p. 228). Further Ambedkar’s devastation of the Hindu scriptures is belittled and misinterpreted in the suggestion that by doing so Ambedkar ‘did not want to leave tradition—rather, he wanted to enter into it’ (p. 233). Equally interesting value judgements on Ambedkar follow. We are told that Ambedkar ‘was so eager to rewrite history that he never grasped the literary nature of his chosen task’. And therefore he ‘allowed his own moral seriousness to get in the way of his moral imagination’ (p. 238). The last nail is hammered by the following sentence: ‘He said he took the Buddha as his guru, and yet, in some fundamental way remained tone-deaf to the Buddha as well’ (p. 239). If that be the case then why include him in a philosophical panegyric to the founders of modern India? These severe judgements come from an apologist of Gandhi who fails to see, or deliberately overlooks, the fact that Ambedkar wrote on caste, like Marx did on class, because he wanted to change history. Numerous critics, who have attacked Arundhati Roy’s introduction to the annotated edition of the Annihilation of Caste as an example of a savarna appropriation of his intellect, often without reading it, seem to have missed the sentences quoted above altogether. Roy continues to draw flak while Vajpeyi has landed safely!