The Idea of India is an appropriate name for Sunil Khilnani's analysis of Indian history. To someone living in the West, India's main force is that of an idea only loosely tied to physical reality. Historically, India has been the Other, the exotic, the land of elephants, spices, and pantheism. More recently, it has become associated with poverty, backwardness, and an oppressive and anachronistic social system. As anyone who saw Gandhi knows, India's own identity emerged from an idea: the idea of a united subcontinent where people of various ethnic and religious backgrounds could coexist in a single secular state. That idea helped propel India to independence, yet was ultimately crushed by Pakistan's secession.
Such abstract concepts largely inform my understanding of India. Yet India is also a real thing, a sovereign country of over a billion people, three million square kilometres jutting out from southern Asia. It is, to introduce an analogy, like a person I have heard spoken of, but never met. I know India by reputation; I do not know it personally.
Khilnani's main achievement with The Idea of India is to impart a sense of personal understanding on his reader. He takes India's multifarious history and makes it coherent without denying its complexity. He invokes the idea of Hobbes's Leviathan (Khilnani, p. 203), makes reference to India's "misshapen muscularity" (p. 42), and describes the country falling in love (p. 61), setting and pursuing goals (p. 63), freeing itself from the past (p. 132), and donning "the garb of modernity" (p. 196). This anthropomorphic use of language heightens the sense that Khilnani is introducing the reader to a friend - someone he cares for, but whose faults he is not blind to. What emerges is a complex picture of a nation at war with itself, fractured by ideological, religious, linguistic, and economic differences, "an ungainly, unlikely, inelegant concatenation of differences," yet one that, "after fifty years still exists as a single political unity" (p. 179.)
The Idea of India is composed of four chapters, each structured as a chronicle of India's history to the present time. The first chapter, "Democracy", focuses on its political development. This development is conceptualized as the synthesis of a long series of ideological influences. India is, as it were, the child of many parents. Expediting, perhaps unwisely, the complications of India's long Mughal period, Khilnani paints a picture of a pre-colonial society unified by a unique religious and social order, yet divided into mutually indifferent autonomous communities. Onto this raw material are superimposed the near antithetical ideals of British imperialism, with its obsession with order and unity.
Indian democracy is at once a product of and a reaction to this combination. Khilnani does not deny the importance of India's history, but he takes democracy as more of a break with this history than a continuation of it. "India," he says, "had little prospective reason to expect it could operate as a democracy" (p. 16.) That it has, he attributes to "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" (p. 17) Colonialism was such a disruptive force that it necessitated the creation of a new Indian identity.
This is where other "parents" play a role: Allan Octavian Hume, Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohandas Gandhi, Subhas Chandra Bose, Vallabhbhai Patel. Khilnani touches on these and other historical figures, but does not take time to got into them in much depth. His readers, he seems to be saying, should either be coming to his book with some understanding of these personalities, or should go out and read more on their own. Khilnani is writing the biography of a continent. Biographies of individuals must be left for other books. Thus the focus is less on the characters' lives, but on the impact they had in shaping the "idea of India". The Indian National Congress lead India to independence. Gandhi brought the independence movement to the masses. Jawaharlal Nehru guided India through its neonatal period. There is even room to praise Indira Gandhi, who consolidated India's sense of democratic principles through her very violation of them. Not all of India's parents influenced it in positive ways, and none was able to shape Indian identity into exactly the image he would have chosen, but all played a role in creating the modern Indian state.
In "Temples of the Future", Khilnani turns more to the post-independence period, and India's attempts to industrialize. I found this to be his least-informative chapter, due perhaps in part to my own economic ignorance, but also to Khilnani's failure to provide details of India's economic development. Again, one can say that understanding requires additional research. However, this chapter continues the formation of the idea of an Indian personality, adding a new level in the form of the developing state. Here we see India going through an uneasy adolescence. Its goal, as modeled by older states, is clear: to industrialize, generate wealth, and improve the lives of its citizens at all economic levels. Yet the existence of several successful role-models does not assure Indian success. Nor does it indicate that the process should be easy, given the turbulent histories of so many Western nations.
The idiosyncrasies of Britain and France were nothing like the trajectories of late developers like Germany and Russia; and all could be read through the contrasting lenses of socialist or liberal theory. For Indian intellectuals in the mid-century, the hope was to condense in rapid simultaneity the different processes that had unfolded in slow sequence in the West: secularization and the rise of a society of individuals, the creation of democratic political institutions, and industrialization. (p. 65.)
Moreover, Khilnani points out India's rarity among new states in pursuing industrial goals under a democratic system. While most economists acknowledge the contradictions, or at least the tension, between democratic liberty and economic growth, Nehru believed it possible to pursue both simultaneously. The results of this thinking are open to debate, but India has certainly experienced much difficulty so far, and is still only part way in achieving its goal. In a democracy, substantial long-term projects are always subject to electoral veto, and are especially problematic in a society as vast and diverse as India's.
Khilnani's assessment of the situation is gloomy. The past fifty years seem to offer little encouragement, and Khilnani has few suggestions for how things might improve, although he does state that education will be essential.
"Cities" develops a similar theme, focusing on the city as the site of tension. To the British colonialists, the modern city represented the ordering of uncivilized Indian society. The founding Indian élite had a similar conception of it. The city was to be both a monument to progress and a bastion of "tolerant Indian cosmopolitanism" (p. 110.) In this, it is at best a limited success.
Typical of this book, Khilnani does not spend much time using statistics to prove his point, instead relying on the vivid and emotional images he is able to fashion with his words. This probably makes him a more enjoyable read, although I think he gets bogged down a bit in his own description, as in the rather long-winded anecdote about Le Corbusier and Chandigarh. What this story illustrates, however, is the schism between the cities' intended function and what they have actually done for Indian society. Rather than being a model of modernism for the rest of the country, cities have formed part of a sharp urban-rural divide which sees much of the population still living in their ancestral homes in the countryside. Rather than fostering liberal individualism and pluralism, cities have been host to the same cultural divisiveness that has plagued the country in general. "[E]ven in the cities, where traditional bonds of community have loosened, a society of individuals banding together to pursue their several purposes through interest-based associations - the Edenic image of the liberal West - has not emerged." (p. 139.) Khilnani provides a powerful example in the Shiv Sena, a militant Hindu organization operating in Bombay. This "army of Shivaji" has attained support through a combination of selective humanitarianism and ethnically targeted violence against such groups as the Tamils and the Muslims. "The Shiv Sena visualizes India not as a land of cosmopolitan miscegenation, but as a hierarchical grid that contains internally homogenous communities, each insulated from the others." (p. 144.) This kind of communalism is just what India's founders tried to prevent.
In Khilnani's description, the cities have failed in their purpose. Instead of becoming procreative centres of liberalism, they remain a monument to an unfulfilled dream. They are representative of many of India's institutions: they were designed under Western influence in an attempt to infuse India with Western ideals. Yet like secularism, individualism, and the English language, they exist only on India's surface, a thin layer of modernism on top of a society that is dangerously heterogeneous and conflicted.
Inter-group conflict is one of India's greatest problems, a point Khilnani underscores in his last chapter, "Who is an Indian?" The question brings us back to one implicit in the book's title, "What is India?" The answer given by India's founders was an unusual one for such an ancient society: not one based on race, religion, or even language, but rather a geographical definition open to everyone. This has left open the question of how to create a sense of Indian identity. There is nothing in India's pre-colonial history to suggest a sense of subcontinental unity. "India" as a territorial entity did not exist until the British empire assigned the name to "a precise, pink territory" (p. 155), hardly an act likely to inspire patriotic fervour. The Hindu caste system provided a certain unity to ancient India, but also promoted division among Hindus and exclusion of non-Hindus. If we are to believe Khilnani - and a superficial glance at modern Indian politics seems to bear this out - not even the revolutionary experience of independence or the charismatic heroism of Gandhi provide a rallying point capable of uniting India's different factions.
The solution has largely been to pick and choose what history to focus on, or even to invent fictional histories in an attempt to capture the Indian imagination. Khilnani quotes Gandhi as saying that, "a nation is happy that has no history" (p. 164.) This evokes an optimistic vision of a people in charge of their own destiny, able to make of themselves anything they want. Unfortunately, the claimed ahistoricity of India is only half true, and is, besides, capable of acting as a double-edged sword. As caste rivalries prove, even hundreds of years of colonialism have not succeeded in erasing the vestiges of India's past. Moreover, Khilnani points out that the ability to re-imagine India's past has worked both for and against the Indian state. While Indian nationalists have been able to create an "Indian" rhetoric, other groups have used the same system to advocate separate identities based on caste, language, or religion. The rise of Hindu fundamentalism is one of the most visible examples of this.
The "idea of India", or at least any idea acceptable to us in the West, thus seems blighted in its inception, the idealism of a few individuals pitted against the harsh realities of modern politics, or, to return to my analogy, an individual's ambitious dreams thwarted by his own physical limitations. Yet despite its troubles, we have yet to see India break apart; we have yet to see the collapse of democracy; we have yet to see an all-out civil war. Khilnani seems to take comfort in this fact, as though each day of Indian survival represents new hope for India's future. India is, after all, already tens of thousands of days into its own future, more than might have been hoped for sixty years ago.
So, if India was a person, what would it be like? It would be someone who could lay claim to many influences, to parents, mentors, and teachers. It would be a person at an uncertain stage in his development, struggling to mature, yet facing many pubescent roadblocks. It would be a person with many layers: friendly and violent, modern and reactionary, independent and insecure, idealistic and pragmatic. It would be someone unique, fascinating to his friends, enigmatic to strangers, infuriating to enemies. Most obviously, it would be someone deeply conflicted, a mess of warring beliefs, desires, and impulses.
In short, it would be very much like someone you or I would know. True or not, that is the image Khilnani produces with The Idea of India: a complex person the reader can relate to, unfathomable, but not inaccessible.
Comments: Wonderful & imaginative essay! Well-written! Keep this up!!
Mark: 18/20