The Ideas of Indians

WHERE DID THE IDEAS that shaped the political foundations of modern India originate? What were the sources of the commitments that guided its constitutional imagination and its understanding of democracy? In recent decades, these questions concerning the intellectual roots of Indian democracy have coalesced around the notion of “the idea of India”, a coinage of Rabindranath Tagore’s whose contemporary valence stems from Sunil Khilnani’s book of the same name. In that seminal work, first published in 1997, Khilnani drew attention to the unprecedented character of India’s democratic experiment. Unlike the democratic revolutions of America and France, the Indian story was wholly novel in instituting universal suffrage in a country whose population was overwhelmingly illiterate and poor, and tethered to social and religious institutions, such as caste, that were deeply hostile to the logic and language of equality. Moreover, this political vision did not ground itself in the idioms of classical Indian political thought, a tradition that was often rejected or bypassed on the grounds that it lacked precisely those political concepts—democracy, freedom, and equality—deemed essential to the new institutional order. In this sense, the founding ideas of a democracy so conspicuously modernist in form and aspiration have often been understood as imported from without, from liberal and constitutional traditions that had their primary referents in the West.

Ananya Vajpeyi’s Righteous Republic seeks to correct and add nuance to this account. For Vajpeyi, “the idea of India” has deeper roots in Indian pasts, and in its modern form emerged through an intimate engagement with, and not a rejection of, Indian intellectual traditions. Vajpeyi returns to the classical phase of Indian nationalism—roughly, from the late 19th-century to independence—and its pantheon of “founding fathers” to reconstruct the decisive moment in which modern Indian identity came into being. In her account, this was a shared endeavour undertaken by, among others, MK Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, and BR Ambedkar—the five figures to which she devotes her attention—and it cohered around the meaning of swaraj or self-rule. More specifically, she suggests, it entailed a profound meditation on what constituted the ‘swa’ of swaraj: the nature of the Indian self that would rule and be ruled. Most crucially, Vajpeyi argues that in their collective search for Indian selfhood, the “founders” were deeply influenced by Indian traditions of moral and political thinking, and turned to ancient and classical texts, ideas, and ideals in the formulation of their political values and visions.

The quest for the Indian self, as Vajpeyi describes it, tethers the search for political sovereignty to a cultural project that attempts to secure the unity and identity of the incipient nation—as in all modern nationalisms. Indian nationalism likewise sought to create, restore, and give substance to an Indian “self” in the wake of a traumatic and dislocating encounter with colonialism. The crisis of the Indian self under colonialism was compounded by the concomitant decline of Indian political traditions. In her view, historians of modern India have all too often represented this encounter, and the nationalist response it provoked, as yielding a modernity derivative of colonial and Western influence. For Vajpeyi, however, a defining feature of the nationalist reconstruction of the self was its understanding of and orientation towards Indian pasts, to Indian history and specifically Indic traditions. Through the course of the book, Vajpeyi aptly demonstrates that Gandhi, the Tagores, Nehru, and Ambedkar all engaged with iconic texts and figures of Indian religious, literary, and political history. This is done through chapters that successively focus on Gandhi’s reading of the Gita, Rabindranath’s rewriting of Kalidasa’s Meghaduta, Abanindranath’s depictions of Emperor Shah Jahan, Nehru’s interest in Ashokan edicts and symbols, and Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism.

The attempt to provide the nation a distinctive history and genealogy is arguably typical of nationalisms everywhere. And, at one level, the notion that nationalist intellectuals turned to historical traditions—to reinterpret them as well as draw inspiration from them—is uncontroversially true and would be true of a very wide spectrum of modern Indian intellectuals. The claim becomes more interesting and suggestive as it relates to modernists, like Nehru and Ambedkar, who more thoroughly rejected the authority of traditions, especially of religious traditions and customary practices.

To be sure, references to tradition can have a politically instrumental role and serve a variety of disparate political goals. They may be used to “bolster the legitimacy and authority” of political claims, or they may make new, hybrid concepts—such as swaraj and satyagraha—resonant with popular idioms and therefore more acceptable and persuasive. For Vajpeyi, however, something more significant was at play and at stake. The turning towards Indian pasts by these thinkers represents a more fundamental achievement, one which, in her terms, actively forged a connection to a pre-existing Indic tradition and thereby revitalised a classical tradition in decline after two centuries of colonial rule. In this sense, Vajpeyi recasts the nationalist project in decidedly more grandiose terms; reference to the past is reconfigured as a resolution to a deep crisis within Indic moral and political traditions. This resolution itself is understood as a “revolutionary reconstitution of the political tradition”, one that makes possible nationalist politics as such, and thus serves as the pivot for India’s political awakening and political modernity.

This is a bold and provocative thesis, but it is a great deal bolder than the evidence and analysis Vajpeyi offers in support of it. I will say more below about why I think the thesis is not ultimately convincing. But if Vajpeyi were to demonstrate the existence of a continuous Indic tradition “from the Vedas to the Constitution”, what would be gained by such an understanding? The continued relevance of the quest for the Indian self as pursued by the founding fathers, for Vajpeyi, lies in their open and forthright return to Indic traditions for support and inspiration, and in the norms and values they unearthed in that engagement. Vajpeyi hopes that establishing the continuity—however fugitive and subterranean—of classical idioms of Indic thought into the modern era will engender a confidence in Indian traditions and recapture a moral imagination that is more closely attuned to “the distinctive nature of Indian reality”. Such a recovery could therefore provide a richer and more authentic language to understand and judge India’s present predicaments.

But in construing the continuity between the ancient and modern in these terms, we might elide some crucial elements that marked the evolution of modern political thinking and practice. For instance, it may obscure novel developments in democratic practice which, in important ways, exceed the nationalist project of selfhood as articulated in Righteous Republic. Indeed, it might well be the case that in terms of today’s politics, we are witnessing a fundamental shift away from nationalist anxieties about cultural identity, political unification, and reconciling modernity and tradition that framed the political debates of a century ago. This is not to say that struggles over Indian identity have receded from the centre stage of intellectual and political life, but only to suggest that they might be better understood as constituted by contestations of a democratic rather than nationalist character. That is, conflicts over the definition of Indian identity today—its boundaries and exclusions—are intimately tied to how the rights, benefits, and dignities of equal citizenship can be meaningfully secured.

Recall here the unprecedented nature of Indian democracy. At first glance, the basic contours of modern Indian political thought and the institutions of Indian democracy may appear unoriginal, as patterned after liberal democracy as it has developed in the West. Nevertheless the outcomes and consequences of such a transplantation reveal a process that was never simply imitative or derivative. The adoption of institutions of parliamentary democracy and discourses of rights, equality, and secularism in India required significant innovation and adaptation in respect to new and changing contexts. Analyses of Indian democracy have increasingly shown that both the intellectual work of the founding generation as well as evolving practices and struggles on the ground indigenised democracy to such an extent that Indian democracy became a model unto itself. Moreover, from myriad local and regional struggles, democratic processes have thrown up new patterns of confrontation and contestation—e.g. novel assertions of caste identity and caste critique—that bear little resemblance to the defining fault lines—modern/traditional, urban/rural, elite/subaltern—of the politics of nationalism. Whether we celebrate democracy’s achievements or decry its pathologies, we have to recognise that both are intimately tied to a logic and trajectory of politics that is distinctively Indian. This is an alternative way to think about the distinctive nature of “Indian reality”, namely through the forms of contestation specific to Indian democracy, rather than by recourse either to a continuous Indic tradition or the cultural projects of high nationalism.

RIGHTEOUS REPUBLIC INVITES intellectual historians and especially political theorists to think more deeply about the ways in which Indian political thinkers situated themselves in relation to extant indigenous traditions of moral and political thought. This is a salutary contribution, one that rightfully asks for more serious consideration of the conceptual innovations that were made possible by reinterpreting inherited traditions. At the same time, Vajpeyi often seems to take the mere fact of engagement with classical texts, figures, and concepts—references which in themselves were, as she readily admits, diverse in content and purpose—as evidence of the renewal of a tradition in crisis and ultimately a fundamental reorientation in Indian political thinking. It is this larger claim that Righteous Republic struggles to sustain.

The proof of this claim would require, in the first instance, a clearer sense of the Indic moral and political tradition that Vajpeyi sees as having been “rebooted and rejuvenated” by nationalist thought. Substantively, the Indic tradition seems to cohere around classical texts, concepts, and iconic figures of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain provenance. But there is a great deal of ambiguity and elusiveness about how the tradition came to be constituted in these terms, and from what vantage point we make claims on and through it.

At times, Vajpeyi speaks of this tradition as given in fact, as organically constituted by “two and a half millennia” of critical interpretation and citational practice. Indeed, the very assertion that there was a tradition “in crisis” and subsequently rejuvenated in the 19th and 20th centuries lends the Indic tradition historical momentum and causal efficacy, and thereby suggests an internal coherence. But Vajpeyi also writes as if the tradition to which she is referring is primarily a retrospective construction, a “modern imagination of India’s ancient foundations” that is closely tied to this particular moment of nationalist assertion. This seems to be the angle that is emphasised when some very obvious doubts about the boundaries of the tradition are posed, for example, by the seeming absence of Muslim and Mughal influence. In the nationalist rendering, we are told, many elements were “left out”—not just Muslim elements but also the entire range of regional and vernacular political and literary traditions—resulting in a political tradition that was necessarily “narrow, selective, biased, and discontinuous in both space and time”. Finally, Vajpeyi suggests a third possible conception in which ‘Indian’ and ‘tradition’ “function as heuristic devices rather than categories with definite and determinate extensions”. Here, I take the point to be that the notion of an Indic tradition can be understood as a rough model or definition that the author deploys for specific argumentative purposes.

None of these definitions are in themselves objectionable, but Vajpeyi often blurs the lines between them and does not acknowledge the necessary tensions between them. Vajpeyi writes that “the default Indian political tradition constructed in modern times” is problematic because of its “emphasis on Hindu and Buddhist elements, at the cost of medieval India and Islam; the preference for transregional and classical languages ... over vernaculars; ... neglect of low-caste, outcaste, and tribal identities; pervasive and persistent gender bias; the bias toward literate elites ... and so on”. It is unclear whether the biases and exclusions attested to in this passage are those of Indian nationalism, or more contemporary Indian political imaginations, or an objective feature of the Indic tradition.

In a similar vein, consider Vajpeyi’s criticism of Ambedkar’s skepticism about the accepted rationale for Buddha’s parivraja or renunciation, a skepticism which she takes to be a sign of a “grave sundering of tradition”. Vajpeyi argues that by rejecting “one of the most iconic moments in all of India’s self-understanding,” Ambedkar thereby strays very far “from the metaphysics of his fellow Indians, contemporaries as well as ancestors”. But in making this judgment, which definition of tradition has Ambedkar transgressed: the Indic tradition as such, the nationalist version, or Vajpeyi’s heuristic conception?

A parallel issue arises with regards to the classical concepts that Vajpeyi uses to frame the thought of her central figures. Vajpeyi couples each figure with a classical concept that is meant to capture and demonstrate their engagement with Indian traditions: ahimsa (non-violence) with Gandhi, viraha (longing) with Rabindranath Tagore, samvega (shock) with Abanindranath Tagore, dharma (law/right/norm) and artha (purpose) with Nehru, and duhkha (suffering) with Ambedkar. There is little doubt that ahimsa was indeed a central concept of Gandhian thought and action, one that Gandhi himself self-consciously adopted, commented upon, and propagated throughout his long career. As such it can be readily taken as a fundamental, organising principle of his life and politics.

But to what extent can the same be said of viraha for Rabindranath Tagore, of samvega for Abanindranath Tagore, of dharma and artha for Nehru, or duhkha for Ambedkar? Do these concepts and categories function to organise the work and thought of these other figures? Are they self-consciously adopted and elaborated? This might be possible to demonstrate in some cases: for example, viraha may indeed have been important for Tagore’s poetic sensibility. However, the textual evidence and analysis available in Righteous Republic tells us very little about how these figures (with the possible exception of Gandhi) defined these terms in their own words, and in relation to their larger political visions.

The analysis relies upon Vajpeyi’s sometimes very interesting, often idiosyncratic interpretations of the classical concepts and less on how these figures themselves understood these categories. Indeed, in some cases, like that of samvega, it is not clear if Abanindranath ever utilised the concept himself. Rather, when Vajpeyi writes of Abanindranath as “being in the throes of a deep aesthetic shock” from the 1890s onwards, this is her own characterisation of the origins and nature of his struggle to define a national art for India.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with using external categories to evaluate and illuminate texts and ideas. But, in this case, Vajpeyi tends to blur the distinction between categories that might be used to interpret or illuminate the work of these thinkers and categories that were purposively adopted and articulated by these thinkers themselves—which creates the impression that the thinkers were captured and captivated by these categories, and that their turn to these classical concepts is therefore deeply compelling and historically consequential. Vajpeyi writes that “duhkha, Ambedkar’s category, shares with Gandhi’s ahimsa, Rabindranath’s viraha, Abanindranth’s samvega, and Nehru’s dharma the peculiar quality of being a hybrid between non-modern and modern meanings of the term; an apparently archaic concept deployed at an utterly unprecedented historical conjuncture for pressing political reasons”. It may be possible to interpret the writer’s work in terms of categories that are not native to their thinking, but to then imply that Nehru “deployed” the concepts of dharma and artha, or Ambedkar of duhkha, in anything like the way Gandhi deployed ahimsa is misleading and ultimately not analytically meaningful.

As with the concept of a continuous Indic tradition, these classical categories are presented as objectively given rather than as interpretative. These concerns are not merely methodological: they affect how we assess the central claim that this revitalisation of tradition was historically consequential, indeed, that it can be taken as a watershed moment in the political life of Indian nationalism. If there is uncertainty about the depth and character of any individual figure’s engagement with tradition, to what extent can we take that engagement as evidence of an epistemological breakthrough that resolved an underlying crisis of the Indian self? It is in these elisions that we confront most seriously a fundamental mismatch between the analysis and textual evidence that organise Righteous Republic’s individual chapters and the ambitious and overarching claim that the collective endeavor of nationalism effectively revived millennial traditions and (in so doing) shaped the political foundations of modern India.

THOUGH VAJPEYI RECOGNISES the fundamentally hybrid nature of modern Indian political thought—that a “convergence” of “Indian and Western categories” marked “the thinking of all of the five founders”, she focuses exclusively on the presence and articulation of Indian political concepts. This focus is justified by Vajpeyi’s sense that these Indic genealogies have been consistently downplayed, ignored, and obscured. She asks, rhetorically, whether we “have become so distracted by how Indians dealt with Western categories—capital, reason, race, nation, citizenship, science, democracy—that transformed political life between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries that we lost track of continuities in Indic political thought from a long precolonial history?” Implicit in the complaint that Indic concepts have not been studied with the same diligence is an assumption that the adoption of Western concepts by Indian intellectuals did not involve the same kind of creativity and imagination as the rejuvenation of their Indic counterparts. The ways in which Indian political thinkers “embraced ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity” is rendered uncomplicated, even derivative. The engagement with Western political thought appears as an imitation that needed to be supplemented and refined by recourse to indigenous moral and political traditions. Indeed, for Vajpeyi, that many late-19th-century Indian intellectuals seemed comfortable as “insiders relative to the Western political traditions” was a primary sign of their estrangement and alienation, a crisis of self that a return to the Indic tradition was needed to resolve.

To my mind, such hard dichotomies between Indic and Western political traditions, and the linear models of diffusion and imitation they so often rely upon, do not take us very far in understanding the development of modern politics and modern political thinking in South Asia. There are many examples of conceptual innovation that emerge out of engagements with and between both indigenous and Western traditions. The question of innovation itself often concerns less the origins of concepts—and the decadence or vibrancy of the traditions from which they are derived—than their transformative deployment in novel contexts and with respect to very new kinds of questions. Indeed, what may define the modern political tradition in South Asia is not the texts to which it refers or concepts which it evokes but the questions it poses. These questions can be construed in a variety of ways, but foremost amongst them would be conundrums about the nature of the modern state, democracy and the idea of equality, and the meanings of secularisation.

The distinctiveness of Indian traditions of political thought, in this sense, need not be sought and secured via the recuperation of purely Indic forms or indigenous thought unsullied by Western categories. Rather it would refer to the very broad range of modern intellectual work that, on the contrary, had to engage—intimately, creatively, and combatively—with Western social and political thought. From the 19th century onwards, one can find intellectuals working within every religious, cultural, and regional formation of South Asia, thinking deeply about how to respond not only to the unprecedented dangers but also the unique opportunities Western modernity seemingly offered. These meditations necessarily involved intense questioning of and negotiation with extant literary, cultural, and political vocabularies and traditions.

Arguably, the most important arenas for this novel brand of intellectual activity were the newly forming vernacular public spheres and the burgeoning print cultures that sustained them. In Righteous Republic, the fraught contact between Western and Indic traditions appears as an opposition between English and Sanskritic categories. But in this respect, something rings false in presenting English and Sanskrit as competing vocabularies of modern politics. It not only imputes authenticity and vitality too quickly to the Sanskritic alone, but hides from view this other terrain of social, cultural, and political ferment. The task for the growing field of Indian intellectual history is to attend more closely, and with some comparative vision, to this domain. For it was here that novel questions and answers emerged around issues of social reform, caste privilege and domination, notions of the popular, and education and mass literacy. These wide-ranging debates not only fed into anticolonial nationalism from below, as it were, but in an important sense connect very directly to continuing conundrums about equality in contemporary political life.

FROM OUR CURRENT VANTAGE POINT, the processes and institutions of vernacular modernity may look more significant then ever before for reconstructing, genealogically, the political forces that shaped modern India. But these are genealogies and histories that an exclusive focus on high nationalism and its cultural politics may seriously obscure. In this respect, Vajpeyi’s formulation of the achievement and significance of nationalism seems to mirror, in an inverse fashion, the framing of Perry Anderson’s widely-debated and critical account of modern Indian politics (which first appeared in the London Review of Books and was later published in book form as The Indian Ideology). Anderson takes the nationalist moment and its cultural, social, and political exclusions—epitomised in the failings of its leaders, Gandhi and Nehru—to saturate and thereby poison nearly every aspect of Indian politics. By contrast, for Vajpeyi, the moral imagination and political vision of nationalism as embodied in these same figures is what lends grandeur and promise to the Indian project. Both Vajpeyi and Anderson rely on civilisational and stylised understandings of Indian nationalism. For Anderson, its deep roots lay in Hindu ideology and the strictures of caste, for Vajpeyi, in the evanescent, millennial persistence of Indic moral and political traditions. Both formulations flatten the space and character of the diverse political struggles and intellectual movements that shaped and continue to shape modern Indian politics. In this respect, especially, nationalism—either in terms of its search for selfhood or its focus on the confrontation between modernity and tradition—may no longer be an adequate framework through which to understand and assess the central dilemmas of Indian politics today. What both works miss is the extent to which nationalism has been replaced by democracy as the dominant idiom of politics in India.

Vajpeyi suggests that much as with the threat posed by colonialism, “India’s sense of self seems once again under stress” from the pressures of globalisation, consumerism, and hypermodernity. Indeed, “the distinctive nature of Indian reality” may have even further receded from our grasp “because of two centuries of the English language on the subcontinent”, and most provocatively, “because academic discourse has gone so far in the direction of diagnosing Indian modernity as being essentially derivative, and has developed such an extreme fear of Hindutva, that it is now next to impossible to find the scholarly language” to represent it.

As I have suggested, there are a number of reasons to reject this way of conceptualising the distinctiveness of India’s political reality and its political modernity. Moreover, it seems far from obvious that India is facing anything like a crisis of self comparable to that which marked India’s colonial encounter. Indeed, one of the most striking features of India’s contemporary orientation is its extraordinary self-confidence, not only in political and economic terms, but with respect to its inherited traditions as well as its mass-based cultural production. To my mind, what seems more urgent is the need to temper this often unabashed, brute, and uncritical confidence, and to channel these political energies into more fruitful and progressive directions. Conviction in India’s democratic traditions and possibilities may play a positive role here, not as pure cultural assertion and self-congratulation, but as an anchor to the difficult and ongoing project of democratisation, and concomitant expansion in moral and political imagination needed to sustain its egalitarian aspirations.