New Book: What does it mean to be ‘Indian’?
Here is a new book by S. N. Balagangadhara and Sarika Rao: What does it mean to be ‘Indian’?
US version can be had for $12.00; Indian version for Rs. 349. Here are the UK, Candian, EU versions.
Any questions, comments are welcome and you can post it on https://groups.io/g/TheHeathenInHisBlindness
This book tries to answer a question that is also its title. This book shares some of the results of 40 years of research in the Research Programme Comparative Science of Cultures. It plots the outlines of the differences that distinguish one culture from another, Indian and western in our case. The narrative does not track differences between nations, societies or religions but investigates domains like experience, sense of the past and constructions of the self to sketch a possible answer to the question. The book straddles the fields of social sciences and humanities to tackle issues of knowledge about culture and exhibits the relevance of these areas of enquiry to us all. It suggests an alternative to the ruling orthodoxies that constitute ‘identity politics’ today while showing that this label hides more content than even what their best proponents imagine.
Written in a non-academic language and an accessible style, the book addresses an intelligent but lay public. Consequently, it contains neither many citations nor any references. However, what it conveys is based on a scientific research programme, whose results are published in scientific journals and research monographs. It also formulates interesting hypotheses currently under investigation.
Today the question What does it mean to be ‘Indian’? faces difficulty. Is it a motto like ‘E Pluribus Unum’ or ‘satyameva jayate’? Is it a ‘colourful’ and ‘beautiful’ culture where people wear bindis, deck themselves in Kanchipuram Silk and do puja? Is it a question of national borders and territories? Or is it an institutional question: about educational institutions, courts of law, a huge parliament or even being the world’s ‘largest’ democracy? Do we belong to a culture of oppression, exploitation and conflict or do we aspire to draw the divine nectar by churning the ocean? Is there something ‘Indian’ about our culture that goes beyond the differences between Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs or Jains? What does it überhaupt mean to belong to Indian culture?
Why ask this question today? Do we not know the answers? After all, as we know, a lot is written about India, her culture, her past, her society, the psychology and sociology of individuals and their groups. Why is that not enough to answer the query about what it means to be ‘Indian’?
It is because what we have learnt about ourselves so far is either false or very fragmentary. Whether one claims that India is a class society or a caste society or a combination of both, one is not saying much. Such a claim merely tells us that India too has a society and that it either fully or partially mirrors other societies and people one way or another. Our question is not whether we are also human beings, whether we also have a social and cultural life, but what kind of people we are, where we are coming from and where should we head as a society, as a culture and as individuals. Thus, we ask: what does it mean to be ‘Indian’?
In answering this question, this book transcends the distinction between ‘the right’ and ‘the left’ by looking deeper into ideas of human beings, society, culture, experience, past and other related clusters. One such element is the colonial past of India which is of relevance not merely to the colonised but to the coloniser as well. It is through the British that India is drawn into western culture, transforming both herself and the West in the process. In outlining its contours, the book shows why its question is relevant not just to the citizens of a country or to members of a culture but to all of us who consider ourselves human beings.
Indian intellectuals have vacillated between virtue-signalling and moral indignation; they have completely given up all intellectual questions and responsibilities. This has resulted in a large, intelligent and educated populace that is hungry for insights that make sense of their world. This group, in India (and abroad), is fed up with being told that they ought to be ashamed of being Indian, of belonging to the ‘third world’ and are no longer convinced that they ought to become as western as quickly as possible. Their numbers are growing by the day. This group ranges from the Millennials entering their thirties to the young retirees entering their sixties. This is the first generation of the middle class, which emerged in the 80s and 90s. These Millennials who grew up believing themselves to be ‘global citizens’ are now confronted with the inadequacy of the stories they have. ‘What does it mean to be an Indian, in the 21st century?’ is a question they are confronting as an actuality with real-world implications. This is a question raised at the level of culture and can only be answered at that level. Neither nationalism nor identity-politics are satisfactory.
This book is sui generis and fills a lacuna that few have identified, let alone addressed. If Asian culture is not simply a slightly inferior, slightly idiosyncratic variant of European culture, as we have been told for a very long time, what else is it? Hence, the corollary question: What does it mean to be an Indian? The author can ask and answer this question because he has theorised on a larger question in his four decades of research: What makes a difference, any difference, into a cultural difference and not a social, psychological or biological difference? As of today, there is no competition. There are books that slice the question in old and familiar ways: religion, politics, spirituality, sociology etc. These familiar stories in their various permutations and combinations have not only grown stale but are demonstrably useless.