Triveni Journal

1927 | 11,233,916 words

Triveni is a journal dedicated to ancient Indian culture, history, philosophy, art, spirituality, music and all sorts of literature. Triveni was founded at Madras in 1927 and since that time various authors have donated their creativity in the form of articles, covering many aspects of public life....

India and Pakistan: The Cultural Crisis

Basudha Chakravarti

Before and even after his election as President of the Congress, Sri Purushottamdas Tandon was anxious to be regarded as an evangelist of what he and many others with him regard as Indian culture. Culture indeed has had a grim role to play in the chapter of India’s history of which independence is the main theme. It was a difference in culture that Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah announced, existed between Hindus and Muslims, and had to be preserved. That difference was ostensibly the genesis of Pakistan. But it was not only the Quaid-e-Azam that made culture subserve a political purpose. Rather, according to non-Marxist thought, culture is the determinant in historical development reflected in politics. Even Marxian thought owns it to be the expression of life the course of which is, according to it determined by the economic motive of history. Sri Purushottamdas Tandon has at least as much justification for regarding culture as the mainspring of politics as had Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah.

What then is the Indian culture that Sri Tandon requires all Indians, irrespective of religion, to own as their own? That culture is admittedly essentially Hindu. To avoid the stigma of revivalism it is now insisted that only the essence of Hinduism need be revived, not the whole of its ritualistic paraphernalia. To obtain detachment from communalist politics it is also emphasised that acknowledgement of Hindu culture as the culture of all Indians would not prejudice the rights of non-Hindus to pursue their own ways of life. Still, the question remains: What is the essence of Hindu culture into which all Indians are required to be initiated? Is it the Vedas on which Swami Dayananda based a strong revivalist movement? Is it the Gita which many Hindu leaders have owned as the source of their strength and inspiration? Or is it the Upanishads on which the Brahmos have relied to build up a strongly dissentient philosophy? Or, is it any of the six Darsanas the message of which intensely varies between pantheism, deism and materialism? There is no authoritative statement of the essence of Hindu culture. Cosmopolitanism is indeed often adduced as its chief trait. Its attitude is Buddhism is shown as proving its intensely synthetic character. That even atheists are accommodated within its fold is presented as a matter of pride. Non-Hindu Indians are not concerned to dispute these claims except where Hinduism operates through exclusivist manners and customs that are a negation of cosmopolitanism. If this is Hindu culture, the non-Hindu Indian has to do nothing actively to accept it. Rather he has already accepted it, for the Universalism of Hindu culture is committed to accepting his approach to life as well. But Sri Purushottamdas Tandon cannot be meaning that, for he insists that there is a particular brand of Hindu culture that is essentially Indian and has to be accepted by all Indians. Yet he has not outlined the essentials of what he calls Hindu culture for non-Hindu Indians to learn. If he had tried to do that, he might at best give his own views. Almost certainly there would be thousands of Indians to challenge his interpretation of the essence of Hindu culture. The average Hindu is indeed unaware of any traits of his culture that are to be regarded as Indian. He would rather pass off his own beliefs, howsoever partial and at variance with those of many fellow-Hindus, as the essence of his cu1ture and religion and deserving emulation by all fellow-countrymen. He is lost in the welter of argument, dispute and discussion over aspects of Hindu life and culture, and would leave those serenely aside. All he is concerned with are some ceremonial rites, and he himself would be flabbergasted were anybody to describe these as the coropendium of his and, for the matter of that, India’s culture. At any rate it would be absurd to ask non-Hindus to take part in the name of a national culture in Hindu religious ceremonies. Roughly again, India’s culture is sought to be distinguished as essentially spiritual and, for that purpose, contrasted with the supposed materialist bias of Western culture. Considering Europe’s attainments in philosophy, divinity and science it is indeed questionable if India’s so-called spiritual effort is so admittedly greater as to permit her claims to distinctive spirituality to be taken for granted. The question is indeed open if spirituality and materialism are not distinctive traits of particular phases of civilisation rather than engrafted in permanence in differences between regions. For one thing the Sankhya of Kapila proclaimed the supremacy of matter thousands of years before materialism with its modern connotation entered the scheme of human knowledge. Rather, it seems creditable to claim for Hindu culture a universal track of knowledge and inquiry not permanently obsessed by assumptions of spirituality. At any rate it would be out of place to tell the non-Hindu communities in India to accept the spirituality of Indian-culture. For none of them would admit that they are in any way lovers of materialism. Rather the main two among them, the Muslims and the Sikhs, claim religion to be the breath of their nostrils, and for their religions indeed they would, they say, gladly die. If India is to be content to claim to be a land of religious culture, there are no communities in the country that would have it otherwise, and it is superfluous to tell them that they must accept the spirituality of India’s culture as the basis of the national being. All communities that inhabit India are professedly religious and would be only too glad to own that theirs is a land of religion.

For it is on the basis of religion that Muslims have carved out for themselves, in the areas where they form a majority in the Indian sub-continent, what they call a homeland. In its professed aim to preserve Islamic culture Pakistan also claims a religious raison d’etre for its existence. It will be necessary then to inquire into what cultural potentialities Pakistan has hitherto revealed. Pending that, however, it is disconcerting to find that exponents of both Hindu and Muslim cultures have become associated in even friendly minds with aggressive communalism. Organisations swearing by culture, professedly derived out of unadulterated religion, have been by universal knowledge active in communal riots. Even people in sympathy with them are not concerned to plead on their behalf anything more positive or edifying than that they stand up well to the other community. The result has been that over-emphasis on religion has had the dialectical effect of suggesting to many minds something very contrary to what was intended. It is that religion has in this age none but reactionary significance. Leaving out that extreme deduction, it is permissible to argue that what is sought to be revived is the social system enjoined by religion. But seeing that nobody would take the responsibility of asking, say; for the revival of Varnasrama Dharma in practice, it is difficult to believe that anybody really considers it possible. No such demand was made when the Republican Constitution was discussed and adopted and totally banned untouchability, which is supposed to be a part of ancient religion. In the practical shape of things, indeed, all the differences of caste and creed are breaking down with greater force than before. Hindu culture which is claimed to be a culture for all Indians remains therefore undefined. It would be a poor specimen of culture indeed were it required to be denoted only by compulsion on all Indians to adopt Hindi in Devnagari script as the national language and by a ban on cow-slaughter. Not all protagonists of Indian culture challenge the secular basis of the national State. If those who do challenge it would go so far as to interfere with the non-Hindu communities’ own ways of life, their professions of culture necessarily dissolve into rank communalism. These talks of culture therefore are at a dead end.

It is necessary to enquire why this should be so. The fruits of contemplation by our ancient sages are doubtless an abiding legacy to mankind. That they were little concerned with empirical science does not detract from the concentrated spirit, of inquiry in which they originated. It is on the face of it puzzling why protagonists of Indian culture do not succeed in building thereon a practical philosophy of life. Speeches and writings, of which there are plenty, on the need to revive Hindu culture and derive strength therefrom, fast resolve themselves into stale inanities. These facts suggest something inherently static about what is intended to be a dynamic determinant of life. And this is not surprising, seeing that exponents of Hindu culture do not care to offer anything but deductions reached some uncounted thousands of years ago. The nonchalance with which it is suggested that nothing has been and nothing need be added since then is amazing. Only it does not make up for the failure to integrate pristine culture with the lives of the people which cannot have remained the same through the vicissitudes of history. The ups and downs, storms and stresses through which India has reached the present stage of an integrated unity at the same time as the Muslim majority areas have been sliced off her, are a most engaging panorama. Complacency would overreach itself in the suggestion that cultural life has through all these periods remained still. And there we face what is at once the problem and the secret of India’s cultural development through the centuries.

For the life of the people of India has really not stood still. The broad historical phases of its development are easy to recall. Even within them, however, there have been many social convulsions with deep cultural significance. The impact of Aryan civilisation on the country is still a subject of research. The protestant cults of Buddhism and Jainism left a deep impress on the literature, arts and architecture of the country. Muslim rule not only introduced its own tenor into the country’s cultural life but actually provided the ground for an effort at synthesis between Hindu and Muslim cultures. That effort has left a distinct mark on the literature and arts of India’s middle ages. It is but pertinent to recall that Brahminic Hinduism and Pakistani Mohamedanism alike repudiate that effort.

There also arose a protest against institutional religion that was countrywide in its ramifications, and whose devotional sway made a bid to level down internal inequalities in Hindu society. Representative of that protest are the Vaishnava Dharma of Sri Ramanuja in the South and of Sri Chaitanya in Bengal and Orissa, and the almost iconoclastic cult of Sankar Dev in Assam. There were many minor cults too, and all of them inspired poetical and musical literature that has been the people’s solace through the centuries. Still later came the impact from the West, and Bengal, for example, which received it earlier than other parts of the country and owned it in the great reform movement initiated, among others, by Raja Rammohan Roy, treasures the liberalism of the resultant culture which then found its universal voice through Rabindranath Tagore and of which the best individual expression was Desabandhu Chittaranjan Das. Other regional movements resulting from the same cultural process are also well known. It is amazing to note that the advocates of Indian culture who would determine the pattern of lives of all Indians disown this dynamic movement of national life through the ages. All that they are concerned to offer is the great cultural fruition contemporaneous with the faint beginnings of the country’s recorded history. And even that is not presented as part of a dynamic, progressive movement of spirit but as static, self-sufficient dogma. Small wonder that in practice it has failed to supply an active philosophy of life. One point will suffice to explain that failure. Authoritative historical opinion lays down the non-admissibility of the evidence of non-Brahmins against Brahmins charged with murder as a fundamental proposition of the orthodox Hindu Code of justice. Nobody today would consider that any less absurd than that under orthodox Muslim rule evidence of non-Muslims and women was not admitted against Muslims accused of murder. Even Muslim rulers respected the Hindu injunction that no Brahmin could be hanged, even though found guilty of murder. Such a philosophy is no proper ground today for religiosity, or religious fanaticism, or indeed even for cohesion among professors of that particular religion. No wonder then it has been perverted, only to be a fillip to Communalism.

What it has become a fashion to call ‘the crisis of culture’ is here brought to the fore on the entire ground of Indian history. The crisis is recurrent and in a sense, perennial. It is the almost incessant challenge from the subdued sections of the people to the set of values discovered by a particular class and also providing it a refuge. Even without subscribing to the Marxian belief in the class character of culture, it is necessary to recognise that the literature of a particular age is a mirror of contemporary society which, even according to Marxian interpretation, has its abiding contribution to make to culture. Classical Brahminism has throughout the centuries set its face against recurring trends of popular thought, with the result that it has not considered it worth its while to own anything of substance, therein and to add, in the thousands of years that have elapsed, anything to its ancient heritage. The classical and popular trends of development have thus been juxtaposed against each other throughout the chequered course of the country’s history. It indeed seems that the people have failed to stand up against the Brahminical offensive typified by Sankaracharya and Kumarila Bhatta. But they have created, and sought refuge in, a culture of their own. Abstract spirituality has thus failed to retain a practical, popular philosophy. At this moment it is awfully submerged under the total moral and cultural breakdown caused by communalism, while even nineteenth century liberalism has, on the ground of the Indian philosophy of synthesis, proved capable of keeping the minds of the initiated above communalism. Ancient culture has given shape to the political dream of a revival of Shivaji’s aim of a mono-religious national life, just as Islamic inspiration has aimed at the re-conquest of humanity in Pakistan. Both have however stumbled on the rook of historical reality and nothing but mutual hatred, that engulfs all moral and cultural values, has been the practical outcome. Without blinking at facts, it is enough to recall that the ideology of mono-religious glory has led to one of the greatest horrors in human history: the murder of Mahatma Gandhi.

It is therefore doing no service to Indian culture to confine it to a static and, even so, unspecified religious dogma. Religion has its place in individual life as a quest for shelter in the universal Existence around us; but its social significance has been reduced to collective ceremonies on a ground of devotional perception. Pressed into a dogma, it gives rise to reaction such as has found expression in “the Sunnyapuran in which the people of Bengal rejoiced in the incarnation of Dharma in the guise of Paigambar and of gods as his Khalifas; this Javana role was assumed by Dharma to destroy their idol temple–an echo of Buddhism in the lower strata of the people of Bengal protesting against the high class Brahminical oppression (Dr. K. R. Quanungo. Presidential Address, 19/4, Indian History Congress, Mughal History Section). The same authority makes himself possible for the statement that Sri Chaitanya came too late to save Bengal from reaction against Brahminical oppression, but he (Sri Chaitanya) was more successful in Orissa where the temple of Puri provides an atmosphere of equality and universal love. Even there, however, Kalapahar laid assault. Even that temple was closed to the so-called untouchables, and the present writer recalls a day in May, 1934, when he saw the gates of the temple closed, reportedly for the first time in about nine hundred years since Kalapahar, for fear that Mahatma Gandhi who had arrived at Puri would storm it with a legion of untouchables. Ancient culture, or what passes for it, is in this way led into a morass of absurdities. It cannot present any sanction for its present claim to provide a philosophy of life for all Indians. And just now it only helps the dissident, disruptive outlook of Periyar E. V. Ramswami Naicker. Protagonists of exclusive Hinduism felt themselves let down by Sri Purushottamdas Tandon when the President of the Congress, subsequent to Sri Nehru’s enunciation of the fundamental choice between secularism and a religio-communal outlook, disclaimed all ideas of chauvinism. Yet it is not a fact that Sri Tandon has given up his policies out of fear. He has had to accept Sri Nehru’s position, only because it is the only position tenable in the twentieth-century world and Sri Nehru is fitted, as no other Indian seemingly is, to assure India’s role in the international currents and cross-currents of the day. Again it is blank reality that has compelled the abandonment of revivalist dreams. So, it is apparently inadvisable to talk in terms of revivalism which has the effect not only of alienating non-caste sections of the population but estranging, even among the so-called castes, minds adapted to the influences of the modern world. As such its effects are definitely anti-national

Freedom, surely enough, has a connotation of culture in the sense of progressive development and expression of the national being. The genesis of culture is the striving for a better life. In the suffering incidental to that striving, culture is conceived. Enough indeed is the suffering through which India today aspires to a life divine. She wants to redeem the suppression of her self through generations of alien rule. She feels so much the social mal-adjustment from which she suffers, because it stands in the way of her attainment of the potential conditions of a vast endeavour. Even situated as she is, she pursues experiment at international harmony in music and, of course, letters. But the very anguish of her striving has cultural potentiality, yet to bear fruition; And life’s marvels are again being brought to us by history almost on a platter. Not the clash of religions in the name of culture, but the pains of the clash might yet prove the best cultural asset for India and Pakistan. So it is felt in the two Bengals where the communities have parted, ostensibly to pursue their respective ways of life The parting is complete inasmuch as even organisations claiming to be left-wing and progressive have not the courage, even if they had the wish, to regret the split or, for the matter of that, to make it their business to put in a word of justice for the minority community of their own country or State. Nobody yet claims that the philosophy of separatism has as yet resulted in any cultural acquisition. Rather, there has been good literature produced in both Bengals by denying, getting round or beyond separatism. Rather, there has grown enough sense of travail to seek spontaneous cultural outlet. There has been love sundered by communal dissension, personal friendship broken on the rock of communal misunderstanding. The two-nation theory and practice has exacted its full price. But its spiritual significance has not been formal. It has been dialectical. The mind that has lost inter-communal feeling may not miss the friends separated by partition. It has all the same been landed into a vacuum not unlike an all-male society unrelieved by any female presence. Any possible claim that it has thereby enriched its quality is still to be made. Eyes that met in despair on the ground of communal riots retain the tinge of an abiding loss. Perhaps they wait to be lit up at the sound of the yet-to-be-composed symphony of eternal parting. For, to be reduced to a communal existence is to have one’s personality dwarfed. To be introduced only as Hindu or a Muslim is to lose one’s human stature. And there is an end of, not fillip to, one’s social and cultural self-expansion. If a particular approach to life is peculiar to a particular religion, the essence of it is nevertheless universal and is an ingredient of culture. So even Vaishanava devotionalism need not be anathema to a Muslim. It would even help his self-perception. For culture essentially is self-expansion. If now the communities have parted on the basis of culture, the song of migration that waits to be written is a song of travail. The memories and traditions of the village left afar wait to be resolved into life’s renewed effort. Still however they seek nostalgic redemption in East Bengal’s song Bhatial. A refugee ex-officer of a former Nawab of Dacca whom the present writer has met, laments that he has not been able to live up to the behest of his lover for a self-contented life. For he has been turned a refugee and is in need of help. Yet his sense of values is derived from his Muslim employer and the consequent sorrow needs to be resolved into life. Forms of cultural expression have been brought by migrants from East Bengal to West but not yet absorbed into any composite pattern of development. To do that is a cultural task of the hour, not to repeat parrot-like many-thousand-year-old dogmas. If Tolstoy universalized Christianity, Gandhi has universalized Hinduism and, on that plane, if indeed anywhere, can Hindu culture have an abiding appeal in the lives of Indians, if not of humanity. In the recesses and passages of a great city the birth-pangs of our independence make a conscious striving for resolution into the dynamics of international life. Workers in that purpose are workers of culture. The sorrows and pains of the Muslim minority of India whose dream land of Pakistan has vanished beyond the horizon of their lives, and whom their country does not quite feel to be her own, are also a component of Indian culture in the making. For, they too are not static, their minds also evolve into what cou1d be accepted as a cultural purpose. The way lies open for Indian culture, which has been made up of composite trends of historical development, to launch a most potential and marvellous experiment in an adventure of spirit. No truer way to national solidarity and glory and fulfillment among nations could be imagined.

Pakistan’s concentrated purpose of self-building will have to transcend, if indeed it has not already transcended without acknowledgement, communal barriers, if it would reach cultural fulfillment. The hankering of East Bengal Muslims for Calcutta is not a mere political greed but a desire to feel the cosmopolitan pulse-beat of Calcutta life. While Pakistan may, for sometime yet, make a bid for Islamic glory, East Bengal needs to make herself aware that the feudal system that she has looked upon as communal domination was yet a historically necessary setting for production for living. It had its culture spread out into the lives of all communities, none of disowned the graces in a musical function at the local landlord’s house under the autumnal fullmoon sky. Now that the system has worn down by its inner contradictions, East Bengal might also be informed that scions of her feudal aristocracy are already out on the streets seeking ways of integration into the minds of the people. Not a sectarian but a human approach is needed to absorb the cultural significance of developments like that. When Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah said to the first session of the Pakistan constituent Assembly that the Hindus would thenceforth cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims in the collective national being, he set well the stage for the Pakistani nation’s undeterred self-expression and self-development. It is not relevant in the present context to enquire why that perspective has since given place to an outlook limited by communal bounds. There is visual evidence however that no cultural pattern of communal fulfillment has yet emerged or even shows signs of emerging. That the East Bengal Muslim youth who feels himself estranged from his Hindu friends, finds himself an alien even on the borderland and–that is the most important thing about it–is not content in his own country and community, is a reality. He is a frustrated personality. If by chance he is one of those removed by post partition circumstances from engagement in Indian life, his sense of deprivation has no cultural antidote in his own country’s life. That is what the dream of conquest he was asked to dream has come to. Varied tragedy supplies free Indians and free Pakistanis an adequate ground for an utmost human effort. For, it is in pain that man strives to elevate himself out of the limitations of the present into a higher state of personal and collective development. Already the desire for freedom, with which goes the minorities’ desire for the removal of the inhibitions that have been put over them, is generating social and personal proclivities that were not within the calculation of those who wanted, and still want, to make, cultural separation the last word in the development of individuality. Out of the lacerated soul’s protest against the ravages of separatism arise social and personal combinations that, cutting across separatist barriers, work in a cultural shape that is not the less real because orthodox minds will call it an aberration. Possibly there too is a synthesis, there is a beckoning to the human mind to the endless vista of unfolding civilization. If there is today a challenge to the existing sense of values, if indeed the whole religious basis of civilisation has received a shock, it is by no means certain that it is not the deliberate clash of communal ideologies derived from dogmatic religion of which the dialectical result has been to cause the hearts of the people seek relief in ways that could at least restore to them a shelter in humanism. For the soul of the people is in agony and cries for succour. Succour will draw upon the immense reservoir of strength that is latent in the people themselves. It is, then, along the course of unending life that we shall reach freedom unto culture and thus fulfill the legacy of the thousands of architects, known and unknown, great and small, of our freedom:

Can you tell me the way to Samarkand?
We are the pilgrims, Masters. We must go
Always a little further. It may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow.

“Across that angry or that glimmering sea,
White on a throne or guarded in a cave
There lives a prophet who can understand
Why men were born. But surely we are brave,
Who take the golden road to Samarkand.”

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