India and Pakistan: Quest of Self

The horizon lay blue before India and Pakistan as they emerged on August 15, 1947 into independence. India had risen out of struggle against foreign rule; Pakistan had not been established without a civil convulsion. The ground of India’s independence was different from that of Pakistan’s self-creation. The one derived from nationalist anti-imperialism, the other from religious nationalism. Without India Pakistan would not have been possible, for anti-imperialism was the pre-condition and it was only in fulfillment of the pre-condition that religion could come into play. India would have been possible without Pakistan; Pakistan would not have possible without the independence of India. So it was Pakistan that forced itself into being. The ground has a direct bearing on the development of both as also their mutual relation.

If heredity and environment determine the characters of men, they also influence the pattern of States. They leave their imprint on the values of life the community cherishes and wants to sustain India’s nationalism was confined to anti-imperialism and without any positive content waiting to be given shape in the National State. Not so Pakistan’s, however. It had arisen on the theory of two nations based on religion. India did not admit the theory but could not prevent Pakistan’s self-materialization according to it.

That caused from the very start a difference between the courses of life on which the two States faced their destinies. India faced fresh fields and pastures new; Pakistan was called upon to discover itself from its basic being, Islam.

Both were however caught in the social and administrative set-up they inherited from the past rule. So the socio-economic pattern was the same in the two States, barring the rather accidental fact that Pakistan’s economy was almost wholly agricultural while India had a fairly wide industrial life, thus causing a difference in emphasis between their respective problems. Rising capitalism made an immediate attempt to take control of India’s political and economic life and, despite the resistance, though feeble, of a Government influenced by the all-embracing national outlook which brought them to power, refuses to let go its grip. But as it is not within the power of capitalism to solve the social problems of this age, its dominance is attended with evils like profiteering and black-marketing that are heavily corroding the cohesive essence of the national being. Yet banking on, the country’s urgent need for industrial expansion, capitalism rules the roost almost to the point of black-mail. The middle and lower classes are involved in sufferings which palliative measures have not yet been able to redeem. Sufferings lead to struggle, and when hope for relief inspires a struggle, says Trotsky, revolution occurs. Meanwhile struggle is necessarily animated by a new outlook on life. Political terms like socialism and communism would very inadequately describe the comprehensive content of hankering for a fuller life that unrealized hopes out of independence have stressed. It is desire for a quality of life that is essentially cultural. That quality cannot be attained within the galling limitations of the present socio-economic order. The very desire for an equitable social order prescribes fraternal equality as the guiding conception of the life in view. It leads vaguely to a quest for values of life that will be an escape from the grinding inadequacies of the present state of being. The existing feudal-cum-capitalist order is however conscious of its utter inadequacy in relation to what the people want. So now it belatedly seeks to annex cultural values rooted in the irrevocable past which have so far been requisitioned to bring into being a religious State. The tendency to coalesce with the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, which represents an attempt to perpetuate the core of medieval values in India’s national being, is indicative of an effort to buttress the existing society by an appeal to the nostalgic hankering in human hearts for the past. But just as a monarchy cannot be established in India today, so the past cannot fill up the vacuum in the present. The only result of reliance on obscurantism is a fillip to still lingering communalism and this has assumed an all-embracing character. To prove this it would be enough to mention the exclusion, contrary to the advice of Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru, of the Urdu script from the national language and the largely successful move to ban cow-slaughter even for Muslim religious purposes.

Yet it would not be true to say that that is all the dead end to which independence has come. The liberal tradition of universalism, which nineteenth-century contact with the West has left to us, still provides an escape from the revivalist obscurantism that would pass muster as India’s abiding message. It derived a dynamic quality from creative minds like Tagore. Independence has landed it in such adventures as incorporation of Indian music into European orchestra the bridging of the gulf so long presumed between Eastern melody and Western harmony. Efforts at combined harmony have been quite successful. But there are strong reasons to doubt if Indian society can proceed far with creative effort, so long as it is caught up in economic disequilibrium. Even if idea does not come wholly after reality, reality impinges on idea, and then idea can at best derive out of struggle against reality. Out of the struggle to conquer reality, art and literature might emerge. Yet free and all-round national self-expression must await the removal of the deadweight of economic distemper. As yet free India’s creative self-expression remains in the realm or potentiality. Even the State is unable to throw off the pre-independence niggardly attitude towards promotion of artistic enterprise. The artists’ conference held under Government auspices has not yet produced any concrete result.

India thus gropes on her way to discovery of herself in the context of independent life. Pakistan is engaged in the same quest but in an altogether different direction, exemplifying the basis on which she has been formed. Pakistan tries to build up her being in Islam–so much so that Eastern Pakistan is asked to forget that she was a part of Bengal. “Nothing in common with non-Muslims,” is the directive principle of Pakistan’s nation-building; but as yet it has only negative results. It is sometimes facilely suggested that Islam is only a catchword used by the present rulers of Pakistan to keep out all popular movements and maintain themselves in power. That may be a fact; but that there is also a genuine movement to re-discover Islam as a guiding principle of life is evinced by popular trends of action including large public meetings, which were formerly not so common, to explain the tenets of Islam on the occasion of the Prophet’s birthday. There is however nothing concrete to show that the lives of Pakistanis have derived any new content from the age-old concept of Islam. Meanwhile the Pakistani has to live in the day-to-day world and can hardly go to the classic Islamic way of life. The subjective inclination to solidarity within Islam runs up against the exigencies of modern conditions of life, which have as much created class differences as they have caused individual lives to depart from orthodox Islamic standards. Pulled between these contrary forces Pakistan is hardly sure of its way to any sustaining values of life. Eastern Pakistan for example pins her faith on the folk-lore in which she possesses an old popular culture. But there are no particular Islamic traits about it; nor is there any indicative of any cultural development based on it, deriving any particular Islamic content, except in the sense of expression of the lives of the Muslim masses. Unable to find any positive content Pakistan’s self-centred consciousness lends itself to anti-Indian communalism, which in its turn strengthens tendencies in India towards obscurantist revivalism. Past politics lies heavily on the mass consciousness of both countries and inhibits self-assured endeavour for creative self-realization in the world currents of thought. To Pakistan however it gives some solidity of purpose reflected in cautious but determined national policies. It is less operative in India, if only because she thinks less in terms of communal solidarity, with the result that there is a conflict between organized conservatism and progressive universalism. There is no gainsaying however that, without integration with modern arts and science, neither will realize her national being. That remains still a process at once consciously retarded and struggling through natural impulse.

Life however is complex, and the chances are that nothing like an evolution to order will be vouchsafed to Pakistan or be successful in India. The pristine purity of Islam disappeared after the first five Khalifs, and the democratic organization it laid down for the faithful has nowhere been evident since. The laws of historical development have indeed proved too strong for that. They will similarly override the tendencies in India for repose in medievalism. For the human struggle for better living incessantly adds to the feelings and experiences of the individual as well as of the mass of people. Feelings and experiences are always the ground of cultural endeavour, and the struggle to get out of the intense social disequilibrium that inhibitive feudalism and ill-balanced capitalism have created, may itself supply the incentive for cultural self-expression.

Meanwhile however there is no mistaking the calculated effort of conservatism, which shields also social vested interests, to maintain itself by nostalgic obscurantism. Such an effort can have no progressive content in this age, and all it does is to foster communal clashes and, what is worse, sadistic communal torture on religious minorities. The more pronounced it is, the clearer becomes the disintegration of present social order and the present society’s inability to supply what would be real spiritual content of life. So while India gropes her way towards extended self-expression, she is disabled from finding it by the forces of retrogression in her social setting, and she is not likely to find it except in an elastic social order and the struggle to reach it. Pakistan will yet awhile want to strike its roots in Islam while an under-current of disillusionment already disturbs her. Both will undergo mighty social revolutions through which the cultural values of a renewed life will emerge and they will perhaps then, and not before, find the mutual adjustment that is inherently lacking today in the very basis of their being. That both the countries have reached the climax of a cultural crisis is apparent on the face of it. Conceptions of life’s sacredness, woman’s honour, minimum decencies in conduct, have all been submerged under the stresses of medieval obscurantism which aspires to fill the vacuum created by departed imperialism and collapsing feudalism, while industrialization is not sufficiently advanced to modernize the people’s attitude and outlook. The total breakdown of the culture reared on a feudal society that has reached only the slummy fringe of industrialism, is apparent the ground of inter-communal conflict which passes, even in its sordid present form of oppression on the minorities, for war, and supposed to excuse the gravest sins and crimes–a sense of values itself indicative of total moral exhaustion. A cynical despair coupled with abstract humanism is the total content of cultural effort to get out of the rut. Nothing more is yet possible, for life itself is still groping for a path. It is the life of the people and they will decide. “Everything springs from the people,” said Gustave Flaubert.