The True Advantage of Bengal
It has been three years back
that the first draft of the AIHB-BOOK I was compiled and released. The
intervening three years witnessed certain symptoms which are interesting and
certain commentators are finding them without parallel. If I am allowed to be
personal, it has been my observation that the degree of surprise encountered is
inversely proportional to depth of one‘s mind. For a sufficiently untutored
mind, any journalistic sensation blared sufficiently longer and louder takes
the proportion of a kind of gospel truth. For a deeper and critical mind, any
event or a chain of events invite a deeper journey into the past and deeper the
journey is, the sensation loses its lustre and in
proportion, its power to dazzle the sight of critical and balanced vision.
I have been living in the
city of Calcutta since 2002 till date and in this period, apart from a
one-year absence (The Horoscope of Cities – Calcutta and London), I lived and earned my living
in the city. It is foolhardy to claim that geographical proximity necessarily
makes one a better commentator of the situation. But geographical vicinity
provides one an organic sense of
being there and if observation is sufficiently keen, one can connect the
present with the past. The greatest danger that lies in interpreting
contemporary time is the vulgar habit of associating too much with the present
itself. Most of the modern media‘s folly fall into this category. That is the
reason why Dickens‘s posthumous fame as a
special correspondent for posterity for city of London is not mainly based
on his journalistic dispatches but on his novels.
A considerable proportion of
thinking and working men and women of Contemporary India are aware that there
has been great changes taking place in India‘s image abroad. The most
noticeable symptoms that media bring to our notice are - 1. Spine-chilling rise
of Sensex 2. Great Investor interest and confidence in India and FDI inflow 3. Indian
companies going global and actually
purchasing companies abroad 4. High IT skill and software expertise which gave
birth to BPO era 5. Globally competitive salaries and compensation packages for
Indian professionals.
There are other symptoms as
well but I think the aforementioned ones can qualify to be the major ones as
one gets the impression in the media. A section of Western media is going a
step further and claiming that 21st century will be a century for India and China just like 18th
century was British and 19th was an American century. So be it.
Bengal has quite recently entered
into these scheme of things, first by the first law of capital which is always
searching for a greener pasture and secondly for certain catalytic agents in
the leadership. Calcutta - a city of vanishing wealth
(AIHB- BOOK I – released on ‘2001) where leaders deliberated the issue of equal
distribution of wealth embraced the idea of creating wealth. Creating wealth is
quite similar to the ancient and homely process of making curd. A residual curd
everyday is used on fresh milk and the cycle goes on. The curd forms because of
the activity of bacteria on milk and above a certain temperature. If the milk
is the fresh resource of each generation and the residual curd is the
historical memory of wealth, political temperature may ruin all by killing the
bacteria, i.e. the residual historical memory. The resource in terms of great
human resource and FDI, proper political temperature all may fail to sustain
the cycle of curd formation in long terms if the bacterial activity is missing.
Extending the metaphor, if historical memory falls below a certain level,
sustainable wealth creation is not possible.
It is the purpose of this
BOOK to forward the fundamental thesis that the so-called rise of India this time should be viewed with extreme caution by the
world at large. I am tempted to say the same for China‘s rise but for a moment, the
discussion would be restricted to India. Present leadership of Bengal will find their
historical duty well-fulfilled and their labours well
rewarded if Bengal can claim a modest leadership position in future India, having emerged from being a basket-case a decade or so back. But in line with the
fundamental thesis as proposed earlier, Bengal has a far wider, far more significant
and unique historical duty, i.e. providing a counter-balance, in cultural realm
while Indian trajectory becomes a matter of evidence rather than a projection. The cultural survival of the future world depends on Bengal where
China and India takes a dominant position. The core qualification
required to fulfill this grand role is to have historical memory. It will
remain the endeavour the next part of this BOOK to establish these arguments.
The Rise of India – History surrounds us
In case we agree to the
wide-ranging speculation that India and China would be pre-eminent in
future world order, there are two issues that need clarifications. First –
historical examination as what make such a rise or growth possible after
examining a set of pre-eminent culture or civilization. Second – If India is going to be such a
pre-eminent power, what are the broad symptoms that are present and that are
absent while benchmarking with those cultures/civilizations of the past. The
first issue is actually a tour of world history and the second issue is a
mapping of those attributes, taking care of necessary corrections required to
extrapolate the future-matrix. A potential critic of this strategy can well
argue that what is the rationale in assuming that pre-eminent civilizations
would be falling into a pattern? In face value, the argument seems quite
logical and attractive. However, in close examination of the argument, we could
find that the criticism advocates a proto-randomized model of growth of
civilizations. In such a randomized view where there is no pattern or chance of
having a pattern. There cannot be any clear-cut sense of growth or
pre-eminence. However, our critic assumes that there emerges pre-eminent
civilizations and they are not mental construct but manifest historical events.
Fortunately, it is not
impossible to construct a fairly reliable pattern in identifying growth of
pre-eminent civilizations. We would take up the following cases in different
historical ages - Greek, Maurya, Roman, The age of Akbar,
British and American. Pre-eminence is a matter of relativity and depends on the historical
environment of the emergence of the particular civilization. For example, in
terms of technology, Greek Civilization may be far inferior to our modern age
but in terms of creative synthesis, the greatest admirer of the modern would
hesitate to say the same. Let us now begin to see the core competencies of
those civilizations or in other words, the key note of their civilization:
Greek:
HDF Kitto, in his masterly account informs us that
behind the glory of Greece lies an idea of unity, a
frame of mind that could always connect the particular to the universal,
whether it is in science, in architecture, in literature or in politics.
This abstract idea was given a soul by Homer – the poet. Homer was read in Greece not as a poet but as a
repository of all knowledge and Plato ridiculed this idea. It was Homer‘s work
became an integral part of the cultural life of Greek city-states.
Maurya: After Alexander the Greek left India, quite dejected, he signaled
the decline of his empire but remained instrumental in building another empire.
The idea of Buddhism, one of the greatest flowerings of Indian consciousness
was destined to be contemporary of this Civilization. What was the core of this
Civilization? It was the idea of self-actualization with a universal sense of
the self. Inside this idea was the seed of a revolutionary idea of equality
before the Supreme Being or Nothingness. In practical terms, it launched an
experiment on meditation and search on such a mass scale, never paralleled in
history. It was also the most serious critique on Vedas and most powerful
challenge to Vedic Tradition so far.
Roman: Romans
conquered Greeks but all the great Romans had Greek teachers. The core of the
Roman Civilization was to give soul and a face to the abstract issue of law and
administration. It was destined to provide its thesis on power and its
moderation and Rome provided vigorous,
interesting and practical experimental paths. In short, Rome was the first to teach the
world what is the true vocation of an elite military aristocracy, its
possibilities and limitations.
The Age of Akbar: Within two hundred years from
the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, India was fortunate to find a
Civilization that was synthetic and synthesis was its core. The reign witnessed
a grand synthesis of hitherto separate traditions: Hinduism and Islam. In an
age when a strong young man could aspire to become a chieftain after a number
of skirmishes, Akbar gave the idea of serving an empire rather than dying in
one of such fighting among factions. This
policy attracted the best of the talent from North-West borders and within,
neutralized the enemies and projected the idea of a larger entity in the land. Fortunately,
the international situation was also quite favourable as Persian Empire was in chaos and Europe was in the ascendancy but
still quite weak to challenge the military and commercial power of the East.
British Civilization The Britons combined, during their finest hour, some
of the virtues of the Greeks and some of the virtues of the Romans. There was
also a sense of confidence among the island nation that they had been given the
responsibility to civilize the planet from a higher authority that can be
termed as Providence, Destiny or God. They could master the art of strict obedience
without the slavish cringing.
They were directly or indirectly influenced by Scottish enlightenment and
behind that was the powerful shadow of European renaissance. It is matter of
greatest debate whether British, even the best among them could bring the
fruits of European renaissance in India. But the best among the
Britons who set foot in India, the failure may be due to
other factors rather than intentions.
American Civilization The idea of free enterprise and liberty that was aired
from the British Isles went to the other shore of the Atlantic, especially the
enlightenment values. The
greatest discovery of the American Civilization was to become a land of manifest
destiny where it was implicit that too much alignment to Government is a drain
on the entrepreneurial vigour of a man or community. We could find that the
country had a great many innovators, inventors, mavericks and amateurs, who
could practice, enrich the national economy and get enriched from their
enterprises without the control of government with its unavoidable bureaucratic
mesh. This was the youngest civilization, fortunate to have the contribution of
Roman idea of a military aristocracy, an international idea of citizenship, the
British idea of rule of law, the Scottish idea of emancipating power of
education and finally, the homely brew – a cockiness that is common among all
innovators, inventors and mavericks. Today, American Civilization has more
proportion of professionals and American
citizens rather than inventors and innovators. It is increasingly
inhibiting the emergence of those classes of men and women who actually made
the growth possible. The greatest corporations with huge clout, rapacious
appetite and post-human ideals are not the best of places for such men and
women to fulfill their potential.
Why an Indian Rise is to be viewed with extreme caution by the world?
Quite simply because, it is
not congruent with any pattern as we discussed earlier. Contemporary India did not have a renaissance,
enlightenment, a reformation or at best a kind of re-examination of its core
values. It has undergone a reform process, quite restricted in the domain of
trade and jobs, share-market and loans, consumer durables and private
partnership in various sectors and finally – a change of direction of the
economic paradigm of the world where India has a natural advantage of having a talent
pool and the pool is huge in size, both as a market as well as a supplier. This reform process has little to do with
core values of the country. It has nothing to do with the core ideas of the
mind. It has done little change to established power-structures and equations.
Many of the symptoms that are seen today in India are not driven by an inner
dynamics but due to co-incidence of lots of favourable factors. To be fair,
opportunities are being pursued successfully but again it is all about doing and buying and selling, there is
little of being or becoming. Every pre-eminent civilization has common set
of core values. In context of Contemporary India, we could detect no such
change or transformation whose nature itself is profound and fundamental. We
could only witness superficial changes triggered by events on which Indians
neither have little control nor can claim to have triggered it.
One can argue that those
changes will manifest later and then only the rise will be congruent to the
pattern. There are two issues on such an optimistic outlook: first, how far is
that future? Twenty years, Fifty years, hundred years? The second issue is the dynamics of other
civilizations, i.e. their internal and external evolution. The second argument
is that this is a unique mode of development and would not have any parallel. This
is clearly a post-modern argument which can vary between the shades of being
confused to being fraudulent.
Let us now try to visualize
the trajectory of such a rise. Since there is no fundamental and profound
change in the mind-set or in the core values, without a preceding renaissance
or reformation, rising wealth will have no other faculties to gratify other
than becoming richer and consuming more. The consumption would have no
boundary, considering a globalized world and in the absence of any cultural
awakening for the most of India (except Bengal, in one historical occasion
– this will be detailed in the conclusion of this BOOK), a culture professed by
a minority will be thrust upon the world in the name of Indian Culture. Combined
with the unquenched thirst of consumption and now the chance-effected wealth to
gratify it, there will be little cultural tolerance. The class who would
earn most of the wealth,
thanks to the education system, is exactly those whose training has little to
do with humanities and liberal arts. Those who are getting trained in these
areas would find themselves at a disadvantage in the job market and would
continue to answer calls for a mass of people who have little more to do than
to buy, get served, replace, renovate and re-engineer. The more seriously disturbing spectacle is to visualize
the next generation the present generation will give birth to and train: The
generation whose age will be 15-20 and that period is somewhere in 2020-2025. They
will inherit the rapacity of consumption without any great cultural moorings except
that comes from genetics. They will be inheriting relatively more wealth and we
would witness the most remote village-level feud (The Ambani brother feud) over
a wealth which is of internationally respectable proportion. In short, we would
see glaring paradoxes of all proportions, in all areas and mostly – in the
realm of culture. The culture will be that which tends to be immature, non-recursive and
un-aware. On this culture remains the potential leadership and that is the
reason why the world should be extremely cautious.
The second issue is that of Government.
Successive Indian Government has to deal with the serious problem of law and
order. I would like to attract the attention of readers to one recurring theme
in certain genre of Bollywood movies and that is of cop-beating by our angry
young hero. This is quite common and quite acceptable. In comparison, this is
quite rare in movies of Hollywood of the same genre. There are
movies, quite popular in India where the cop-beating
becomes the central theme. I have a theory to explain this phenomenon, which
started at the fag end of the British rule and projects another debate that
raged between Burke and Rousseau during the days of French Revolution (1789).
By 1930s, British Government
could achieve something very significant in India: a kind of respect for law
and order. A sense that a policeman is backed by the power of the state and he
is as much as feared and as much as to be looked as a friend in need. To the
uneducated masses, a policeman was the closest embodiment of the law. In all
civilized society, this has to be so. But the civil disobedience movement
started off by a Gujrati barrister; presently a national leader of greatest
influence over the same masses, at a stroke pulled away that fear and respect
for law. The implications has been
catastrophic and remain one of the greatest challenge that Burke threw away at
Rousseau and haunting all reformers and revolutionaries ever since. In answering
Rousseau‘s great advocacy in tearing down the existing edifice by the violent frenzy of revolution, Burke asked : In doing away with all rights and
privileges, in tearing down all prevalent laws related to property rights in
the name of liberty, what is the guarantee that after that this first right to
liberty will be respected ? Urging a huge uneducated mass to disobey the evil laws of British, what was the
guarantee that once the good laws are
in place, they will be obliged to respect it? Once the momentum to disobey is
so powerful and already being unleashed, is not it naïve to assume the opposite?
Indian society, since then
could not check that momentum in terms of violating laws. So is the acceptance
of cop-beating. In reverse, policemen in India consider themselves not as
friends of common men but tend to get the respect through bullying and threat,
little understanding the fact that they do so because of the sense of lack of
respect. I have yet to meet an Indian who has told me anything that elicits
respect about our courts – in appearance, in functionality and in the image it
has in the mind of the people.
In case of an India that is going to be
potential leader, Government of any variant needs to face this challenge:
educating the masses about the profound significance of law. Without this sense of law, the wealth
that will trickle in will cause more harm than good. The elite will design laws
with all good intentions, only to see that flouted by the masses whose momentum
to disobey laws has been a matter of history and not a local or circumstantial
issue as Hindi movies of Bollywood makes us to believe.
One hand is a cultural
situation that has no moorings and on the other hand a legal sense which has
been contaminated for immediacy, a section of India is getting wealthy and due
to democracy, a part of that wealth will trickle down to the bottom, not due to
lack of rapacity among Indian elite and corporations but due to some of the
evident properties of market economy.
If
all the great news about India‘s rise and so on are genuine and sincere from
all quarters, the world at large should be cautious because this rise has no
cultural mission. India is not undergoing the process of deep soul searching as
to what to offer to the world from her core but I could foresee the following
only : a huge market, a huge pool of professionals to export, a huge land-mass
where millions and millions of Call Centre can be built, a huge reserve of
water and natural resource which can be easily polluted and finally – a
rapacious and consumerist generation whose only mission is to approximate the
West in terms of infrastructure, cars, dress products, services and salaries. Due
to the present economic situation and considering her potential in terms of
resources size and people, India is quite likely to achieve
that. But still cried the Plato‘s Ghost - What‘s then?
Why Bengal is the only hope of the world in a world-order where India‘s
pre-eminence is an evident fact rather than a projection?
When I returned to Calcutta after a decade to live as a
resident again in 2002, I used to ask as whether this great city has any
historical duty left. The more I used to look around; I could only see a
symptom of decay and hopelessness, a kind of self-pity at the march of
Bombay-cash and Delhi-connection. By mid nineties, a middle
class Calcutta boy used to return from Bangalore to describe the Southern city‘s
splendour to his friends at Calcutta and they envied him. The episode is
virtually same for a Calcutta citizen of hundred years
back, recently returned from London. Even in 2000, Calcutta was a city where I was
repeatedly told and quite sincerely that she had been forever lost and already
fulfilled her historical duty. But I always had a suspicion. A suspicion born
of love and an irrational faith that there is some fault with this
rationalization. But to be frank, the logic was quite strong and the visible
evidence was all too compelling. But the great observer of human heart, Pascal
has said it so beautifully – There is a
reason of the heart which reason will never comprehend.
In 2006, having lived in the
city for three years and observing certain paradigm shifts in the land, a hope of
a rational kind has emerged within me. For clarity of presentation, I would summarize
the key points which will be elaborated point-wise. Finally, these key points
will be combined to demonstrate the validity of the thesis.
·
For last one thousand years, in
the domain of ideas and culture, with minor breaks, Bengal can only be told to be a
truly globalized land. Buddhism had a strong presence in the land, then Sree
Chaitayna. Prior to Sree Chaitanya, the Sufi ideas were well accepted in the
land. No other land in India except a part of Malabar can
claim such consistency and continuity until the 18th century.
·
In 1800s and continuing upto early 1900s, Bengal‘s genius to global
outlook in the domain of ideas reached its height. Keshab Chandra Sen provided
the test tube on which Christianity and Hinduism performed their grand
experiments. The tradition of
Ramakrishna-Vivekananda went global a hundred years back and in 1960s, the
founder of ISCON took the message of Sree Chaitayna to a global audience.
·
None but the students of this land read the literature of Europe with such a consuming
passion. It was only in this land where the soul of Europe found a place. Nowhere but
in Bengal in India where a poet like Micahel
Madhusudan Dutt could be born. Nowhere but from here Raja Rammohan could
provide the idea of an international state. In 1789. No Indian of contemporary
time could ask, except Bankim: Is the
British Civilization performing her historical duty here in India? The historical duty implies
a repayment of debt: the debt owed from Greece and Rome and who in turn might have
received from India and Egypt as well as Phoenicians in
some earlier era.
·
One of the greatest poets of this land for thousand years designed and
implemented a seat of learning of true global spirit. It was the same genius of
this land who has provided a key of this whole essay in one sentence: Every nation or race
has to base its greatness on some core greatness of man - manusyata (the
reality of being a man). In context of England, it will be foolish to believe that they have become
great on their military power, commercial clout or scientific talent alone.
Manusyata boro Na hole kono Jat boro hote pare na – No race can claim real greatness
if it could not bring out its greatness in the plane of the reality of being
human. This sentence was never uttered in so clear a fashion and with so much
of pregnant meaning anywhere in the vast subcontinent. In today‘s context, the
sentence ventures to ask: Does the India of Future showing signs of becoming
great in the reality of being human? And if its not, then all the talk about
growth, FDI inflow, excitement are chimeras and they will vanish as suddenly
they came.
·
Nirad C Chaudhri was
haunted by the import of this question in context of India all through his adult life.
At the end of a grand career, he gave us a piece of observation, contained in a
single sentence but took a whole lifetime of suffering and searching to stamp
it with authority : In certain aspects of
culture, it will be fair to say that other communities in India cannot even
compete with Bengalis, to say anything of superiority.
Returning back to our
original thesis that Rise of India will have serious implications for the world
at large unless a balancing and comprehensive cultural process is embedded
within it. It is also demonstrated that only Bengal, due to her unique cultural
make-up and default tendency of being truly global in spirit can provide that
balancing force. A hundred years hence, Calcutta citizens might be honoured
for fulfilling what Edinburgh citizens did for Europe in the Middle Ages or they
will vanish from the scene of history for not doing their duty. The core
requirements for this are to have memory, power to think and faith in a higher
ideal of man. Fortunately, Bengali has all the three. She is waking up to her
historical memory, she produced one of the greatest critical minds of the land
and finally, in spite of all her aberrations and sensuality (a gift of the
environment), she has committed herself to higher ideas – be it the precepts of
Buddha, be it the call of National Movement or the more international call of
Marx and Mao. We are not here to judge as how right or wrong she was, she did.
In her entire history of thousand years, she has not failed to answer the call
from within and without. Like France, she is always great when
she fights for the whole humanity rather than for her petty self.
In a world order with rising
figure of India and China, Bengal has to make her second tryst with destiny and
this time, the responsibility is more and the opportunity of creative contribution
enormous. Success of Bengal in this venture will be a success for the world
and her failure, in a limited sense or complete sense would have no one to
mourn for. Because, there will be few left to have understood what the loss had
been.
Summary and
Afterthoughts
It is
said that when a regime or a system leaves many a stomach empty, they are
sowing the seeds of revolution. But a still more ancient wisdom of statecraft
advises shrewdly that a king should feed his subjects well, entertain them and but
make sure that their mind empty. Caesar was right when he gave a futile warning
to himself about Cassius – the lean
hungry man who thinks too much.
Any tyranny, overt or covert is uneasy about
thinking men who think objectively
and totally. In 1960s, the
ideological debate was about capitalism and communism. This debate exists no
longer in the global scale. The only ism, without any ideological colour can be
called as manager-ism. The economic
fabric of the world is becoming such that classical definition of exploiter and
exploited is not as clear was it was to earlier thinkers. One might argue that
the investment banker is exploiting his driver. This same banker might lose his
job without a notice because the fund has failed due to some political
change-over, or merger or acquisition on which he has no control. The driver
may use the sensex to quadruple his income by becoming a small but lucky
investor. This income might buy a PC through loan and his son or daughter might
earn an income by providing small translation or proof-reading services to
international clients over Internet. So classical theories about exploitation
needs to be reviewed.
A few
weeks back, the news from France confirmed what Burke told
two hundred years back – the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. France is again on streets but not
to give something to the world which would make those streets holy but to
protect its own petty self. It is looking for some kind of bandobost so that they could refuse their destiny and live nicely,
securely. There lies the answer to France‘s no to the takeover of one French
company by an Indian industrialist. Never before, even during capitulation of
1940, France has sunk so low. The soul of France has lost the French-ness and
no amount of economic or social re-engineering would work now.
With France gone, it is only Bengal now on whom the hope of the
world of the future rests as far as cultural awakening is concerned. Let us
read the works of Bengalis of hundred years in addition to studying the expert
opinions of merchants and speculators, business agents and money-managers, -
the high priests of the new ism - Managerism.