The Idea of India
by Sunil Khilnani
We read the “Idea of India” as a wrap up to the discussions of “The People”s Constitution’. A proposal for forthcoming readings was that we should each read out lines/paragraphs that they found most compelling, as an anchor for the discussion.
Here is one set defining Khilnani’s narrative of the idea of India.
In the beginning, “By renouncing political power, the Brahminic order created a self-coercing, self-disciplining society founded on a vision of moral order.” “This arrangement of power explains the most peculiar characteristic of India’s pre-colonial history: the perpetual instability of political rule, the constant rise and fall of dynasties and empires, combined with the society’s unusual fixity and cultural consistency. Its identity lay not in transient political authority, but in social order.”
Therefore, “..the experience, at once humiliating and enabling, of colonialism, which made it impossible for Indians to regard their own past as a sufficient resource for facing the future, and condemned them, in struggling against the subtle knots of the foreigner’s Raj, to struggle also against themselves.”
But, “If India was weakly united, it was also weakly divided: there were no politically significant regional identities that could either obstruct unification or direct it.”
“India was a society neither of liberal individuals nor of exclusive communities or nationalities, but of interconnected differences.”
And so, “Partition is the unspeakable sadness at the heart of the idea of India: a memento mori that what made India possible also profoundly diminished the integral value of the idea. It conceded something essential in the nationalist vision, the conviction that what defined India was its extraordinary capacity to accumulate and live with differences.”
Finally, “..dreams of partition and domestic purity are animated by the fantasy that all problems begin and end at the border; they do not. There is no ideological or cultural guarantee for a nation to hold together. It just depends upon human skills. That is why politics, as an arena where different projects are proposed, and decided for and against, has never been more important for Indians.”
As decided, we are now shifting into reading history, and will read “Shattered lands: Five partitions and the making of modern Asia”, by Sam Dalrymple. The plan is to read it in two parts – upto (and including) the chapter titled “The red dawn”. That will take us half way into the book.