Book Review: Deepak Kumar,The Trishanku Nation: Memory,Self and Society in Contemporary India

Deepak Kumar’s thesis is that contemporary Indian society is plagued by corruption, casteism and communalism; to counter these ‘monsters’, the answers lie in the greater promotion of democracy, science, authentic secularism, a free press and diversity, and more concretely, in the social endorsement of inter-caste marriages and of women presiding over the time-honoured Brahmin rituals of birth, marriage and death. This is the burden of his social-religious and historical tale, spun out with a rare mix of journalistic and academic narratives, and the integration of personal and historical memories.

That tale begins in Monghyr (now Munger), a mofussil town (‘Birmingham of the East’ in the days of the Raj), where Kumar spent his early years, where Hindus and Muslims lived cheek by jowl and where Hindu and Muslim religious festivals rather than rituals brought them together in communal harmony. The mofussil boy also learns about poverty, the daily humiliation of women and the general obsession with fair skin (‘a barometer of beauty’) and the presence of illegal gun factories. The move to Patna for higher education and then to New Delhi, Calcutta and Kurukshetra in search of a job as an archivist completes the making of this historian of science and education (Chapters 1 and 2). By now, the boy has seen for himself the vital role of ‘control’, ‘pairavi’ and ‘extra’ (p. 24) in everyday life in small-town Bihar. All these came together to make Bihar a byword for poverty, corruption and violence.

In ‘Techtonic Shifts’ (Chapter 3) and ‘Our Polity’ (Chapter 4), Kumar moves away from selfhood and personal memory to offer insights into the possible historical roots of the sorry state in which Indian society finds itself today. British colonial practices, it appears, have a lot to answer for. The introduction of an elite education system (primarily to provide a civil service for the vast colony) and the census raised the hydra-headed monsters of casteism, religion-based communalism and the demand for reservations (the Mandal Commission). Casteism had its origins in fears of the supernatural and the unknown and of disease; these were exploited by the priestly castes and further reinforced not so much by the division of labour but that of labourers.

British colonial rule, Kumar repeatedly makes clear, ‘was no philanthropy’, but rather

a carefully crafted mega-business carried out with an iron fist. It was a machine, a machine of war, of bureaucracy, of profit, of desire, even of fantasy, above all of power. For some it was a sense of fun and an opportunity to make money. For this, they used all possible disciplines and technology, be it history, anthropology, linguistics, sociology, engineering or law (p. 79).

He acknowledges though that ‘the colonial administrators or collectors of rent were also explorers who very often contributed to and expanded the frontiers of knowledge. They interacted with the locals whose knowledge they respected’ (p. 79). Colonial rule was of course also a hard-nosed attempt to divide the populace and set one community against another.

He finds the contemporary Indian political scenario terribly depressing, yet ‘the same politicians who are corrupt have given us the right to information, the right to education, the rural employment guarantee scheme, the right to a few kilos of food grain and a strong Lokpal’ (p. 94). The politics of consensus has been replaced by the politics of acrimony (p. 87). The present government, like Indira Gandhi’s earlier, governs autocratically but administers constitutionally (p. 88). Strangely, the author is often reluctant to name well-known political parties and politicians, especially those he obviously detests.

Chapter 5 is entitled ‘The Market and the Watchdogs’; Kumar is clearly distrustful of both. In a brief analysis of the ‘Fourth Estate’ (pp. 117–123), Kumar takes the media to be a monolith and the television audience to be victims of the clichéd ‘idiot box’. ‘It is not without reason’, he argues, ‘that the television is called an idiot box. It is less a relaxation, more an addiction; it stuns the mind. It allows men and women to escape realities and wander in fantasy’ (p. 120). In a later chapter, the author admits to the complexities of ‘reception’ and ‘interpretation’ but fails to see that these apply to the modern mass media as much as to language and speech.

It is in Chapters 6, 7 and 8 where Kumar is on home ground and the archival scholar takes over; the ‘rumblings’ are for once subdued. In ‘Knowledge and Education’ (Chapter 6), he takes us through colonial approaches to education, meant primarily to control rather than empower, or even to create knowledge. In ‘Science, Technology and Development’ (Chapter 8), he offers an incisive comparative analysis of European and Indian philosophy and theology in an attempt to make the case that Indian religious thought was in no way inferior. His rare insights into the semitic and Indic religions indicate that while each may have its own distinctive traditions, there is a lot that they have in common.

The concluding chapter, ‘Whither India?’, raises crucial questions about the social, economic and political future of the country, now that the new Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has turned unabashedly nationalistic and right wing. At several places in his argument about the kind of polity India needs, Kumar reiterates that he is opposed to ‘coalition’ governments at the centre. He discloses that he is supportive of Arvind Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party and that he has voted for it in the last elections.

He calls for the ‘decentralisation’ of governance but does not spell this out in any detail. This is the major limitation of a rather argumentative book which deals with a host of subjects and concerns about contemporary Indian society but with no clear solutions proffered. As he himself admits in the Preface that these are ‘some reflections’, ‘random notes’ and the ‘rumblings’ of a historian, ‘This work is basically a halafnama (testimony) filed in the court of posterity’, and adds interestingly that ‘history need not always be instructive, it can be fun and a way to unwind’.

The main title of the book points to India as ‘The Trishanku Nation’, suspended as it were between heaven and earth in a kind of happy purgatory or limbo as the mythological Hindu king was. It is a nation that is certainly in transition, trapped between aspiring to be a superpower and the harsh reality of its abysmally low social indicators. The subtitle of the book, on the other hand, points us to ‘memory, self and society in contemporary India’. However, the author makes no attempt whatsoever to wrestle with some fundamental questions raised in the title: What is the relationship between memory, self and society? What is the nature of historical memory? How is it distinct from personal memory? Which kind of memory is nearer the historical truth?

A final ‘rumble’ of my own: It is noteworthy that the book has been published by none other than the reputed Oxford University Press; yet, nowhere in the 211 pages of the publication is there any trace of the copy editors of this globally renowned publisher having made any attempt to spruce up the language. Some glaring errors in spelling too have been overlooked (e.g., ‘cessation’ for ‘secession’, ‘reigning in’ for ‘reining in’ and ‘unexplicable’ for ‘inexplicable’). Shoddy editing detracts from the readability of a serious and scholarly work on contemporary India by an eminent professor of history of science and education at Jawaharlal Nehru University.