Open Letter to Smriti Irani: On Teaching Sanskrit and Mother Tongues

If German is a foreign language to millions of Indians, so is Sanskrit and Hindi. An open letter to the Education Minister questions the policy to teach Sanskrit in schools and raises fundamental points on “local” language(s) and mother tongue(s).

 

Open letter by  Sowmya Dechamma

On Teaching Sanskrit and Mother Tongues

Dear Ms Irani,

Many of us are aghast at your decision to remove German from the list of languages that a child could have studied in Kendriya Vidyalayas (central government schools under the Ministry of Human Resource Development). More troubling for me is the decision to make the study of Sanskrit compulsory. Some have rightly pointed out the incommensurability of such a decision: the axe on German and the active neo-liberal policies that the current Indian Government is pushing forward. They have also pointed out how in this global world, studying a foreign tongue would only increase the skills and worthiness of our children, paraded as future citizens. It does not need to be reiterated it was the German Orientalists starting from Wilhelm von Schlegal in 1823 who translated, consolidated and categorised Sanskrit literature as the sole claimant of “Indian Literature”. My concerns however, are elsewhere.

My son goes to a Kendriya Vidyalaya (KV) in Hyderabad. I was indeed puzzled to know that the KV offered Hindi, Sanskrit, and German but no Telugu or any other living Indian tongue. Sometime ago, I went to the school authorities and asked them about the absence of Telugu, especially since the three language formula that they cite does mandate that all schools need to teach the “local” / “regional” language / mother tongue. The answer was even more puzzling. If students or parents want Telugu to be taught, there needs to be request from at least ten parents. What I did not understand is this – if teaching of a “local” language has to be requested for, how come the teaching of Hindi and Sanskrit does not follow the same logic?

But I have a more complicated question – what indeed is “local”? Or what is one’s “mother tongue”? In Hyderabad, given its social geography, Urdu is equally local as is Telugu. Urdu was the medium of instruction for centuries until the 1956 linguistic reorganisation of states. Urdu implied culture and sophistication, had a “proper” history and culture, and unlike Sanskrit was and is accessible to all. Urdu not only has a cultural history but also has a popular one so evident in cinema from Mumbai: it is Urdu cinema we consume not Hindi as has been pointed out so very often. So then, why not Urdu? What does Sanskrit suggest that Urdu doesn’t? Let’s forget Urdu for a little while and ask -- what about other local languages that are not considered worthy enough to be included in the 8th schedule and modern enough to be called modern Indian languages? Telangana, where I now live has many such languages pretty much like elsewhere in India. Banjara, Gondi, Konda, Kui, Kuvi, Pengo and Manda are just to name a few. So, if the dominant local in Hyderabad is Urdu and Telugu, the local in Adilabad should be Gondi among others. If children learn best in their mother tongues, why not their own tongue?

I mention these languages because my children do not have a single mother tongue – one is Kodava, a language of Kodagu from Karnataka and another Telugu. Kodava like the above languages mentioned is oral and therefore does not become part of the list of languages desired in modern nation states. Historically, the idea of mother tongue is a recent invention. Sumathy Ramaswamy, Lisa Mitchell and Francesca Orsini have beautifully shown how mother tongues in the cases of Tamil, Telugu and Hindi respectively have been built over a period of time, how the construction of a mother tongue is largely an intellectual enterprise and how the idea of mother tongue is based on certain exclusionary strategies. More importantly I mention these “small” languages because I think there is a need to recover differences, a need to distinguish between lives practiced and imagined histories that have supposedly bound us together. The People’s Linguistic Survey of India 2013 mentions that there are over 780 languages in India. Of these 780, around 210 languages belong to the north east India. How many of us can even name two among these 210 rich, diverse, north eastern Languages? Why should one bother? It is "they" who should know what is "ours", not the other way round. Never in human history has "who has to know what" been naïve and bereft of power. In such a scenario when it would be immensely worthwhile to explore ways to study these languages, why Sanskrit?

Unlike German, Urdu, Hindi, Telugu and indeed English, these languages do not have the factor of “usability” or a writable history. If German is foreign, so is English. What do we do with it now? Stretching a little further, Sanskrit is foreign as well to most Indians. But then, languages grow, die, borrow, give, and evolve constantly. What is somebody else’s now like English will become ours now either by direct or indirect forces of power. Aren’t we proud of Tamil being one of the official languages of Singapore? Do we not gloat that Hindi, Bangla, Tamil, Sanskrit, etc are taught in America, Canada, Europe and other places? That Hindi / Urdu cinema has an industry of its own in Nigeria is of huge consequence for us not only in terms of profit but also in matters of cultural-pride.

I am sure you are aware that it was not very long ago that Sanskrit as a language, as a carrier of privileged knowledge was denied to a majority of people, even if they wanted to learn it. It is no wonder that a language and knowledge it carried that was so well guarded within the still unbreakable walls of caste practices, died a natural death. Given the contemporary situation where it is mostly children of “backward” and “lower” castes who attend government schools, whose histories have no memory of Sanskrit, isn’t it ironical that what was once denied to them is now made mandatory, even when they do not want it? The upper classes/castes to whom Sanskrit can be said to have belonged once choose between French or German or Spanish in their hip private schools.

May be we need to think as to why the recovery of difference from very “local” spaces becomes essential. Because it gives each one of us a space to claim as our own, because only then there is resistance to the merging of histories and spiritual symbols, because only then the indifference to histories of “small” people with small languages can teach us many a thing -- in schools or elsewhere.

I am hoping that you will reverse this decision and will come up with more innovative ideas as to how and what our children learn.

Sowmya Dechamma (sowmyadechamma@uohyd.ac.in) is at the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Hyderabad.

 

{ Courtsey: EPW, Vol. 49, Issue No.47, November 22, 2014 }

Double of Modernity and Education and Pedagogy: Sasheej Hegde

The most natural and perfect work is to generate its like. – An Alchemist’s Wisdom 

Always responsive to the challenge that modernity implies for education and pedagogy – as indeed the converse, the encounter of education/pedagogy with modernity – the contribution of Krishna Kumar (hereinafter KK) entitled “Rurality, Modernity and Education” (EPW, 31 May 2014: 38-43) alerts us to the double bind of possibility and impossibility that lies at the very core of modern education and pedagogy. 

Indeed, if KK’s thesis is plausible (which it is), then the effectiveness of all short-term measures and compromises with reference to curriculum and pedagogy come into question. This constraint may be further addressed by the following question: how can KK’s understanding of the reciprocal challenge posed by modernity and education give any concrete account of the singularity of educational practices when they seem to be irreducibly structured by the double bind of modern education and pedagogy? My effort, in this response, is to make clear and re-thematise this double bind.

My point precisely is this: if (modern) education and pedagogy are about both possibility and impossibility, then a reflection adequate to this state of affairs needs to be effected; and, what is more, that if the current stalemate about educational reform and pedagogy which KK’s essay documents so well is to be surpassed, then we need to be augmenting our thinking about modern educational practices at whatever level.

Engaging the Double Bind

I have discussed aspects of the question in two recent pieces in the EPW, one analysing the issue of “critical pedagogy” as contextualised to the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) textbook cartoon controversy revolving around B R Ambedkar (EPW, 5 October 2013: 66-72) and the other devoted to the forwarding of the claims of (what I had characterised) “method-centred” research pedagogy (EPW, 1 February 2014: 63-68). It may not be necessary to recapitulate the ground of these two forays, except to admit and affirm with them that the current edginess over educational practices has also to do with an “undecidability” about the tools and resources of a modern critical pedagogy. Importantly yet, we can see KK’s attempt as adding another dimension to the deadlock, one having to do with the force of the declarative act underlying modern education and pedagogy, namely, the programmatical thesis, taken to be central to modernity, that far from education creating modernity, “it (education) embodies modernity inasmuch as its own encounter with modernity has transformed it so vitally” (p 38).

Allow me to foreground the problem in the context of KK, before venturing ahead. Having set up a broad contrast between modernity (whose “leading edge” is urban life) and rurality (or rural living), KK goes on to pose sharply the following “paradox for education”: “The association of modernity with urban life poses a paradox for education because modernity in education is rooted in a pedagogic culture which is essentially rural” (p 38). While this in itself need not produce the double bind of modern education and pedagogy that we are here interested to engage, it is what KK goes on to say that foregrounds the double bind of possibility and impossibility taken to constitute the core of modern education. Let us thematise from within KK. Working through fragments of an expansive history of education in India (incorporating both colonial and post-Independence history), KK finds in the context of these changes a “new grammar of rural-urban relations” taking shape, with the “town or the city connot(ing) aim or intended direction, whereas the village connoted a sacrificed belonging” (p 39). Aside from this “existential grammar” however, as KK astutely reminds, “the town and the village are related to each other as epistemic entities in a parallel grammar of modernity”, according to which the “town is where knowledge about the village is created and stored” and in terms of which “the village, as an object of consciously and assiduously organised knowledge, is born in the city” (p 40).

Quite clearly, some aspects of the double bind that structures modern education and pedagogy are apparent here, even if KK does not himself formulate it as such. It is when he goes on to explore the “rural response to modernity” that what we are calling the double bind becomes even more evident and challenging. KK is concerned to sound the limits of a “modernity” in education that is “rooted in a pedagogic culture which is essentially rural” (p 38), and which “involved the transmission of modern ideas to the villager” (p 40). Having stated so, KK shifts gear, turning to the “new realities” of rural India and striving to “examine what these changes might mean in terms of rural modernity” (p 41).

Foregrounding the point that “the state’s attempt to universalise elementary education” (as combined with “the general social trend towards literacy”) has meant that sizeable sections of the rural population “now possess the rudimentary skills associated with literacy than was the case at any earlier point in modern history” (p 42), he pointedly asks about “how these new elements might shape our perception of rural modernity” (p 42). KK here quickly dismisses the validity of “general answers”, but asserts, all the same, that there is a persistence of “gender and caste-based disparities in literacy, employment and children’s education” (p 42). He highlights the limits of government reports, all too fixed as they are on “enrolment data”, discounting (in the context of gender) the “length of girls’ education and the quality of their experience at school” and (in the context of caste) the “handling of mixed-caste classrooms by teachers” (p 42), while going on to maintain, starkly, that the “same programmes that pushed enrolment high have also diluted the village teacher’s economic status and professional identity” (p 42).

A Movement Across

Having formulated, on our terms, aspects of the double bind that encapsulates modern education and pedagogy, we must probe this condition further. A question that will concern us here is: what kind of normative and theoretical weight can we lend to this double bind/paradox? For KK, as we have seen, education has been “one of the prime means through which the grammar of rural-urban relations ...has been internalised by successive generations of the rural population” (p 42), a point which, we must stress, is in keeping with his emphasis that education “is not merely a measure of modernity, but also the designer of its inner nature and meaning” (emphasis added). The latter lines which I have italicised are particularly noteworthy, and we will return to it later.

For the moment, let us look at what KK infers from this prognosis. As he writes, “(i)n the history of modern Indian education ...the curriculum has primarily served as a means of dissemination and control”, and in this light wryly observes that “(a)s a vehicle of modernity, education [has] remained largely empty of modern pedagogic values” (p 43). He is clear that “the village we construct with our modern, urban imagination is at least partly a myth of our making” and that “(o)ne contribution of modern education and its curriculum has been to reinforce a polarity between rural and urban living” (p 43). Accordingly, even as he avers that the “reality of both villagers and city-dwellers may offer far greater evidence of an overlap than a polarity”, KK underscores the point that the “insistence that the remaining agenda of modernity is mainly in villages often leads to distorted priorities” (p 43).

Without doubt, it is not the historical and/or logical plausibility of these ideas that I am interested to query here (and there is much that one could say on this score). My concern, as already indicated, is with the kind of normative and theoretical weight we can be lending to the framework of these ideas. In rendering, as we have, his “paradox for education” as a double bind of possibility and impossibility that structures modern education and pedagogy, KK may yet object to the interpretation that we are placing on his text/rendition.

He has every right to do so. But it may be worthwhile, for one and all (including KK), to consider the following (and I am afraid I am going to be synoptic here): (i) interpretation must often involve working with the grain of a text (without, of course, twisting its contents); (ii) we must avoid over-simplifying (or trivialising) the space of modernity; and (iii) at the heart of all learning and pedagogy is an impossibility of ever attaining it in all its possibility. Lest I be misunderstood, I must hasten to add that I am certainly not implying that KK’s understanding of modernity is trivial and/or that his erudite and thoughtful probings of modern education and pedagogy (both here in the short text that we are here complicating and elsewhere in his wider corpus) are flawed.

My point precisely (one, incidentally, in the spirit of KK) is that if we need to be augmenting our thinking about modern education and pedagogy, then the various aspects of the current stalemate over educational practices and the reform of those practices need to be addressed. Obviously, KK is concerned to push the normative weight of his prognosis in the direction of a “fresh vision of rural modernity and education” and which takes “the rural teacher’s agency seriously” (p 43); I am interested to thematise something different though. Allow me to reformulate.

Grounds for a Re-thematisation

All too often, disquisitions about change (within an institutional realm or across them) take the form of an evasion of the changes. I am not saying that this has happened with KK, but to insist – as I do – that change cannot be applied to any referent does not mean that it cannot be used for an act of reference. In this oscillation between a possible referent of change and the use of changes in an act of reference, there lurks an ambiguity about whether a set of changes can be interpreted and seen as consistent or inconsistent without bringing in something external to change.

It is the normative strength of KK’s argument that he bases it on, as we just saw, a “fresh vision of rural modernity and education”. On a rough understanding of that interpretation, it is an attempt above all to comprehend modernity and education/pedagogy through change (rather than comprehending change through modernity/education). The difference is difficult, yet crucial, and it has to do with what happens when, subjected to the pressure of a dynamical object, namely, change – the fact and the value of change – one (as analyst or interpreter of changes) decides to consider it as (if you will) a terminus ad quo rather than as a terminus ad quem. That is to say, an analysis devoted less to the end-point of a process of change (terminus ad quem) than an analysis of the ways in which changes are produced (terminus ad quo). Those given over to questions of educational reform and pedagogy at whatever level cannot avoid the ground that KK traverses therefore; and yet, we need to be thinking further about educational practices and measures of/for critical pedagogy.

It is very hard to give a critical justification for any clear contrast between modernity and education/pedagogy, although it has been constantly resorted to in the historical study of cultural forms. I do not doubt a causal connection between them, of course. But what seems very much a question is whether this causal relation is effected and mediated by what? Also, how is their necessity being framed – in relation to what and in what terms?

Summarily, inquiries into the causality of modern education and pedagogy take such forms as, say, “how did modern education secure itself and with what consequences?” or “what makes modernity capitalise on education and pedagogy as instruments of change?” and, again, “what is it in modern education and pedagogy that gives rise to modernity?” – investigations structured, clearly, by the expectation that some causal activity procured certain effect by means of some kind of force or immanent logic. Not that such a line of questioning is in principle unjustified or in practice useless; they even could correspond to the way things (have) come to be and thus elicit something internal to a process of institutional becoming. But I think it is vain to keep pressing the inquiry in such terms when the answers do not always justify them; and it leads only to confusion and miscomprehension then to posit classes of phenomena which correspond not to the answers received but to the questions put.

Note that my problem is not quite the logical ease with which we confuse “preconditions” (plainly, the histories of what led up to something) and “effects” (the aggregate of the changes which that something causes or that unfold in respect to it). Rather – and to limit ourselves to the double bind of modern education and pedagogy – I am trying to draw attention to the “undecidability” of modernity wherein (or whereby) the significance and status of educational practices and decisions continually change or differentiate themselves and are consequently inaccessible (or, even, ultimately meaningless). On this register, whose full contours I am afraid I cannot unravel, the singularity or unicity of (any) modernity – connected or unconnected with formal education and pedagogy – would be undecidable.

KK, I am inclined to think, has some measure of the problem, but does not push it through, remaining content with the claim that education (as we highlighted in the previous section of our commentary) “is not merely a measure of modernity, but also the designer of its inner nature and meaning” (p 42). Indeed, this diffidence only heightens the problem, so that even as KK is appropriately keen to record the encounter of modernity and education, the surface on which this encounter is staged (namely, rurality) ends up reinforcing the very antinomies that structured the encounter in the first place. There is also, I think, a short circuiting of the discourse – and meta-discourse – of learning processes organised in the institutional form (whether school, college, or university), which is further accentuated when KK alludes to the “rural” character of pedagogic modernism. But that would take a longer process of unravelling than what the EPW would allow. Hopefully, in the event of a dialogue developing in these pages, I can delve into this axis of inquiry.

This response to Krishna Kumar's "Rurality, Modernity and Education" (EPW, 31 May 2014) attempts to make clear and re-thematise the double bind of modern education and pedagogy.

{ Sasheej Hegde (sasheej@gmail.com) teaches sociology at the University of Hyderabad. }

From : EPW, Vol - XLIX No. 47, November 22, 2014

Oh God, save me from my friends, followers and flatterers: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India is a 2011 biography of Indian political and spiritual leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Lelyveld and published by Alfred A Knopf, Harper Collins | Pages: 452 | Rs. 699

“Oh God” God”, Gandhi once said, “save me from my friends, followers and flatterers”. It’s remarkable how Gandhi—someone who seems to transmit a clear, direct message, whose life seems to follow a defined parabola, whose place in history we are sure we know—continues to surprise and unsettle. In his own life, he went through a parade of identities, and so too in his afterlife. But it’s not just that each age will have it’s own Gandhi.

There is something deeply discomfiting about the life as it was actually lived—before it was tidied up by his self-appointed friends, followers and flatterers into a Life that now apparently requires protection by our politicians.

Gandhi appeared to embody harmony and unity, yet his own life consisted of anything but those qualities—often impulsive, inconsistent, conflictual, fragmented. He would launch political initiatives like satyagrahas and civil disobedience, then abruptly end them; he would establish communities and ashrams, and move on; he would win the leadership of the Congress, and then retire to spinning and toilet cleaning; he would enter into intimate friendships, then turn away. He insisted that his own life and action was of a piece with his thought and principles—yet repeatedly they pulled in different directions.

So it is common to search for some unifying thread to his life: something that can explain the eccentric shape of a life at once monumental and elusive to the naked eye. Some have delved into psychology, some look to religion and ethics, others to political opportunism. Joseph Lelyveld, in his new portrait, hopes to find it in Gandhi’s fundamental feeling for the lowliest—and he wants to show that such empathy wasn’t a natural stance for Gandhi, but one won (and only ever partially) through his experiences—and which required Gandhi to struggle with his own prejudice-bound self.

That emphasis leads Lelyveld to focus his intellectual energies on the twenty-two years that Gandhi spent in South Africa. Those years, Lelyveld claims, were formative, taking Gandhi to the belief—well-founded, but never quite as well-founded as Gandhi himself liked to think and put about—that he could see the world from the bottom up, that he could fathom as few others the needs and hopes of the most oppressed, and that he had therefore an unquestionable right to speak for them.

Lelyveld, a former senior journalist and editor with the New York Times who has done stints in both South Africa and India, ought to be well-placed to bring news of Gandhi’s time there, and the first third of his book, devoted to Gandhi in South Africa, is by far the most illuminating and worthwhile.

Worthwhile for two reasons. Lelyveld shows in a more thorough way than before Gandhi’s deeply ambiguous, struggle-filled efforts to deal with religion, caste and race in South Africa. What Gandhi experienced in South Africa, through his close encounters with the Muslims, lower castes and indentured labourers of the Indian community, and more incompletely through his more distant relations with Africans (whom he largely excluded from his struggles to win rights), would serve as the psychic material out of which he forged his distinctive universalism—a universalism rooted in the claims of the minority and the marginal.

Don’t reduce a deep, intimate friendship and Gandhi’s experimentalism to the cosiness of a gay relationship, warns Sunil Khilnani.

The second reason is that this book helps us to better understand the steps by which Gandhi came to experiment with and ultimately dispense with that bedrock of any—and especially Indian—society: the family. Gandhi treasured domesticity, but despised the family. He came to see the family as the channel through which were transmitted the poisons of caste segregation, religious intolerance and material possessiveness—the entrapments of purity and property. Breaking the family’s monopoly over domesticity was perhaps Gandhi’s most socially radical move—and it was only possible for him to do this in South Africa. There, he could discover new forms of domesticity—with individuals, couples, communities.

In 1904, Gandhi met Henry Polak, an erudite 21-year-old Johannesburg editor, who discussed Tolstoy with Gandhi and introduced him to the work of John Ruskin—which immediately inspired Gandhi to set up Phoenix Farm, his first experiment in communal living. His own family, Kasturba and their four sons, drove him batty—and even before Phoenix Farm got going, Gandhi had invited Polak into his household. A couple of years later, Gandhi would himself walk away from Phoenix, leaving behind his wife and children, to move in with Polak and his young wife—the first of a procession of inventive menages that Gandhi would create for himself.

The oddest—and yet in some ways most direct—of these domestic try-outs was the almost two years he enjoyed with Hermann Kallenbach, a ‘muscle Jew’ from East Prussia—gymnast, athlete, successful architect and wealthy bon viveur. Gandhi closed down these last two of his companion’s activities, but not before Kallenbach’s wealth was used to purchase the 1,000 acres that became yet another communal laboratory, Tolstoy Farm. Before the farm, the two men lived together in several properties of Kallenbach’s, and for a while also in a tent.

For anyone who has read Gandhi’s letters to Kallenbach (unfortunately we don’t have Kallenbach’s—Gandhi destroyed them), full of playful teasing (Gandhi, ‘Upper House’, always addressed his partner as ‘Lower House’), anyone who has seen the careful way in which Kallenbach preserved everything and anything to do with his time with Gandhi, it is impossible not to conclude that this was indeed an extraordinarily deep and loving friendship. It clearly involved physical intimacy—though whether related to reasons of health, or to passion we shall never know. Gandhi had by this point adopted celibacy, and he imposed it upon Kallenbach—though with what rigour we also cannot know.

It’s actually rather wonderful to notice these things about Gandhi. It confirms him as one of the greatest experimentalists that India has ever produced, experimenting with truth, in pursuit of truth, in a way that was more radical than perhaps any Indian before or after him. It seems absurd to reduce Gandhi’s profound and vast existential experimentalism to the cosiness of a gay relationship—as we’ve done, ahead of reading Lelyveld’s book and led by the suggestions of a sour British historian-reviewer.

Friendship is the crucial word here. For what we can see is how, for Gandhi, friendship would become the highest form of human relationship—a bond devoid of instrumental aspects, purely voluntary, and between equals: compelled neither by legal contract nor instinctual passion. In later life, it was friendship that Gandhi insisted on as the basic political relationship—one that could convert the enmities of religion, inequalities of caste, or injuries of imperialism, into mutual human recognition. It was friendship that Gandhi sought with Jinnah, Ambedkar and Mountbatten—as well as with those more intimate with him.

His interest in celibacy, though usually explained in terms of his interest in Brahmacharya, was not merely about abstinence: it was about abstinence in order to enjoy the pleasures of disinterested companionship, friendship.

Gandhi was prone to infatuations—after brawny Lower House, in later life it would be more ethereal creatures like Esther Faering and Saraladevi Chaudhurani. But at the end of the day—as his letters to Kallenbach and to others display, letters concerning what Gandhi perhaps mock-solemnly called the ‘food question’, which detailed precisely how many nuts he had eaten, how much milk he’d consumed, and railed against ‘full-mealers’—Gandhi was more interested in his digestive rather than his sexual organs: in mastication, not masturbation.

Lelyveld is gently persistent in his efforts to elicit gaps between Gandhi’s life as it was lived and as he later chronicled it—between Gandhi the activist and the memoirist. In the case of Gandhi’s South African life, Lelyveld concludes that while it was transformative for Gandhi himself—furnishing him with perceptions, commitments and methods, that would later define his Indian politics—it had, contrary to what Lelyveld terms ‘Gandhi’s somewhat rosy version of his heroic personal history’, decidedly less impact on the politics of his adopted home.

Indeed, Lelyveld’s account of Gandhi’s South African life is far more subversive not for what it has to say about the Kallenbach connection (details of which have after all been known for quite sometime), but in his claim that Gandhi left South Africa at the end of 1914 not as the victorious leader of a satyagraha movement that had delivered rights to indentured Indians, but rather as part of a deal with Jan Smuts, one that in fact left Indian labourers worse off. South Africa helped make Gandhi, but he had less impact upon it than he liked to claim, or than post-apartheid South Africa—which has made Gandhi one of its heroes—would prefer to think.

The Gandhi that Lelyveld brings back to India is a man fitfully awakened in his human empathy, and also one coming quickly to a sense of his political command. What is striking is to see how Gandhi—the most exotic, weird human the Indian subcontinent has ever produced—soon after his return to India, had acquired for himself an undisputed claim as the man who knew the Indian masses best, and could speak on their behalf. “Without any impertinence I may say I understand the mass mind better than anyone amongst the educated Indians”—yet, coming from a man back in the country a mere five years after over twenty abroad, it was an assertion full of impertinence. How on earth did he manage to make such claims credible to so many for so long?

No one—biographer, historian or acolyte—has ever really managed to explain this. Was it all a rhetorical performance—as the rising scholarship on Gandhi’s symbolism, body, theatricality, would have us think? Was it his ideas—as the studies of his philosophical, religious and ethical beliefs claim? Was he just a masterly political fixer—as accounts of his capture and manipulation of Congress tell us? Sheer force of personality, charisma? Or was it that goat’s milk he had begun to drink—as Kasturba, who encouraged him to indulge, might have liked to think?

Lelyveld himself concentrates on Gandhi’s social vision. He explores the Indian Gandhi through a series of episodes which he believes reveal both Gandhi’s inner conflicts and his struggles with fellow Indians: his standoff with Ambedkar at the London Round Table Conference and then at Poona; the Vaikom satyagraha and Gandhi’s attempts to breach upper-caste barriers to temple entry; his running skirmishes with Jinnah; and his final epic failure to stop communal violence by exiling himself to Noakhali.

Like all who write about Gandhi, Lelyveld has to confront the shifting meanings, obscurities, ambiguities, inconsistencies, of Gandhi’s actions. And it is one of the virtues of Lelyved’s book that it does not try to tidy these up in a simple ‘message’. Nor does he opt for the other easy judgement: which would see Gandhi’s inconsistencies as evidence of his hypocrisy. Yet what he does end up with is less than remarkable. As he traces, for instance in his interesting exploration of Gandhi’s Vaikom satyagraha, the different messages Gandhi was sending to different interlocutors and audiences, his seemingly calculated fluidity of position even while claiming to stand for principles, Lelyveld finds himself concluding: “What really shows here is the difficulty of being Gandhi”. No one, I think, ever did imagine it was easy.

Like every good journalist, Lelyveld is a skilled rhetorician in the art of knowingness. Wherever information is sparse, he resorts to the leading question, planting an idea even as he denies it evidentiary status: “Could this have been such an occasion?”; “Did it involve the day’s events? We’ll never know”; “Could the example of the white mine workers have served as Thambi Naidoo’s mustard seed” (and that’s all just on one page, admittedly a passage that represents a rather critical—if non-weightbearing—bridge in his interpretative narrative). The reader will encounter a fair sprinkling of terms like “possibly”, “probably”, and “it’s not far-fetched to think”. Leyveld’s style can be engaging, but he is also often at risk of achieving a certain sophisticated banality.

In assessing Gandhi’s legacy, Lelyveld marks its severe limits. And yet. It is true, as Lelyveld insists, that Gandhi did not abolish untouchability. But he did de-legitimise it. It is true, as Lelyveld tells us, that Gandhi did not succeed in cementing Hindu-Muslim unity. But he did make all thinking Indians feel embarrassment and shame when religious violence and bloodletting occurred. Unlike a Lenin or a Mao, Gandhi’s chosen instrument of change was not the state, but the imagination. His work was to transform belief: more difficult, slower, but perhaps in the end, more enduring?

Joseph Lelyveld’s book arrives in India apparently already pre-read and certainly pre-judged. We need to put aside that false knowledge—so we actually read and genuinely discuss it. We can then, finally and thankfully, hope to move into a new phase of biographical scrutiny of figures like Gandhi—where basic questions can be raised, taboos explored, and where we can start to see them as humans in hard times. Studies by Rajmohan Gandhi, Narayan Desai, Tridip Suhrud, and now Lelyveld—all let us see Gandhi not as the prim pope of non-violence, but as a more subtle being, often in emotional turmoil, ragged in his personal relationships and cruel to his family, a better starter than finisher, dependent on entourages of aides and adorers, selfless and egotistical by turns—and always able to command the deepest loyalty.

The idea that a politician like Narendra Modi can self-erect to defend Gandhi’s legacy, that he and Gujarat are Gandhi’s guardians against supposed charges of perversity and racism, is laughable. I well remember sitting in a Gandhinagar cinema a little more than a decade ago, at the very time when Modi was manoeuvring himself into power in that city, watching the film Hey Ram—and can never forget how, at the very moment when Godse is shown pumping bullets into Gandhi, the cinema hall erupted into wild applause to celebrate Gandhi’s death. I remember too watching the West Indies playing a Test match at Ahmedabad’s Motera ground—and when they took to the field, being pelted by bananas and greeted by monkey whoops. Today’s Gujarat, before it can imagine it has any claims to Gandhi, let alone to defending his memory, has a long way to go.

(Sunil Khilnani, In Outlook, under Books/Reviews/Essays on May 02, 2011)

Mistaken Idea of Rural India

As rural consumption outpaces urban demand, has the hinterland actually turned the corner? Pradyot Lal & Kajal Basu analyse the paradoxical idiom:

For long, it was the almost solitary exception of a certain Hiware Bazar, the extraordinary village of 1,350 in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra, which has some 60-odd rupee millionaires.

The success flattered to deceive the wide world about the real nature of the Indian hinterland’s growth story, or the absence of it. The picture has since had a marked shift — not marked enough to constitute a nationwide trend, but still notable enough for the rapid changes in consumption patterns in the countryside.

Make no mistake about it. The number of those with deep pockets in the hinterland is on the rise, even when the phenomenon may be limited in terms of reach and extent to primarily seven states: Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Punjab. The pockets of conspicuous affluence that are mushrooming in these key states have helped change the big picture in a significant manner.

However, a caveat is necessary to comprehend the dimension of the shift. It is not the call of financial inclusion of the government that is leading lenders and corporates into the Indian hinterland, but the sheer opportunity to make profits. For long told by increasing sales of shampoo sachets and low-end motorcycles, the great Indian rural story is having a paradigm shift. Bankers, especially the private ones, who always look for the big ones, are now joining the scramble to capture the rising ranks of the rural rich.

Five years ago, Kotak Mahindra Bank, which was more of a broker-lender than a traditional banker, showed agricultural lending as part of its retail portfolio. At that time, it constituted 15 percent of the total Rs 16,200 crore retail portfolio. According to figures available now, agriculture forms part of Kotak’s commercial banking group, and constitutes 40 percent of the Rs 21,452 crore of such assets.

That one example speaks volumes of the growing importance the non-descript and clichéd countryside now plays in the lives of men driving around in fancy imported cars.

Renowned for taking the cream of the clientele, Kotak has found a new target — the rural rich. As can be empirically established, the confluence of affluence in rural India and saturating business as far as the urban rich are concerned, is forcing several banks to fan out to less-privileged rural India. The banks have an additional incentive: they have the chance to convert the increased savings that lie in physical assets, such as gold, into deposits. Rural India has famously distrusted formalised banking (the savings-in-themattress phenomenon), but the scenario is changing.

Wealth in the countryside is growing, which has made the proposition of being in rural India interesting for lenders, bankers and corporates. Financially more remunerative farming and the real estate boom in parts of the country over the past 15 years have put many farmers in the league of at least rupee millionaires, making them an attractive proposition for bankers.

A case in point are the strides made by HDFC Bank, which started moving into the rural market only five years ago, but now has almost 55 percent of its more than 3,500 branches in rural and semi-urban areas. In 2013, it opened a majority of its 520-odd new branches in the preceding year in rural and semi-urban pockets.

Although the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) mandates banks to open a quarter of their branches in villages with less than 10,000 population, reports indicate that Kotak Mahindra plans to do more as the cost of setting them up is just a fraction of what it takes in an urban area or city.

Banks are fast realising that rural branches are not necessarily loss-making and unviable. They are making special efforts to keep them slim and efficient, which will translate into greater profits for them. A banker with HDFC explained that most of the rural branches are profitmaking, especially if the need to keep the costs low is kept in mind. The banks offer almost everything from a plain savings account to loans for businesses — they also provide ready wealth management advice. No longer is it the monopoly of a State Bank of India to woo rural targets with comparatively deeper pockets.

As an expansion strategy, many lenders lean on the village sarpanch who, according to most, is probably the best pr person or salesman the banks could have. With his network, the sarpanch could also act as a credit information bureau by suggesting who are trustworthy and who are not. It is no longer rare for rural bankers to carry a micro atm with them, which can do multiple transactions at a time, including cash withdrawal, deposit, fund transfer and balance enquiry.

This scene is being played out practically every single day in the interiors. Many sincerely believe that rural India, with 68 percent of the country’s population, is evolving rapidly and changing character with growing incomes, rising literacy and aspirations. It has the potential to be a sustainable growth engine of the Indian economy.

Multinational companies are using the growing network of mobile phones and Internet to offer products and services to the rural 

Two years ago, credit-rating agency Crisil had attributed the growth in consumption in rural India to non-farm job opportunities and State-initiated employment generation schemes. The study noted a shift in spending patterns in rural areas with consumers moving beyond necessities such as toothpaste and soaps to so-called discretionary products such as television sets and mobile phones. One in every two rural households in the regions studied had a mobile phone and even in the country’s poorest states such as Bihar and Odisha, one in every three households had a mobile phone.

Some 42 percent of rural households owned a television, according to the study, up from 26 percent in 2009.

Consumers in rural areas are using products that once sold largely in urban areas: skin and personal care products are showing substantial growth, according to a recent study by ASSOCHAM. Even when it comes to consumer packaged goods, semi-urban and small towns are leading growth in terms of value.

The RBI has reported that consumer prices in rural India rose 8.7 percent in 2012-13, while rural wages jumped by some 18 percent. The extra cash in the hands of the rural population has fuelled demands for several such products that were considered to be almost the exclusive domain of urban areas and metros. However, the question that remains largely unanswered is whether real wages in the rural areas are also increasing, given the nature of the limited employment provided by State-run schemes such as MGNREGA. The majority of the government- run schemes are short-term income boosters and the need to replace them by sustainable job schemes is largely paid mere lip service. The upbeat rural story will come under stress if sustained inflation continues.

Figures reveal that growth in sales of scooters and motoRBIkes slowed by 5 points or more last year to end just a point or so below 10 percent. That is the alternative rural story that could quite easily overtake the upbeat one if inflation and other variables remain high, warn experts.

The changes have been bewildering indeed. Even the smallest village store today offers customers the choice of a dozen soap brands, toothpastes, shampoos and the like — striking outward manifestations of a fast-changing consumer marketplace.

Probably, nothing illustrates the transformation of the marketplace better than the oft-cited success story of one of India’s largest consumer products maker, Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL). According to a study, two years after India embarked on its ambitious reforms journey in 1991, the country’s largest consumer goods company had revenues of around $400,000. By 2013, HUL was not just reflecting the new reality of the Indian marketplace — that of a globally integrated economy — in its name alone. Its revenues had also grown more than 11-fold to more than $4.6 billion.

Several conscious decisions helped the HUL advance. Its ability to spot the changes in the marketplace and adapt to them has been an abiding factor, claim its managers. For instance, HUL was one of the early entrants into the rural marketplace, where rising growth, better technologies and supportive government policies in a few states were combining to transform the traditional rural economy. Now, with half of India’s estimated consumption market for packaged consumer goods and durables, that rural bet has paid off. HUL retained its numero uno status in the consumer goods segment until the cigarette manufacturer ITC successfully rode the reform wave to transform itself into a food, consumer products, packaging, hospitality and information technology conglomerate.

Even the smallest village store today offers customers the choice of a dozen soap brands, toothpastes, shampoos and the like 

In the durables space, the transformation has been equally dramatic. The incredible growth in mobile telephony has transformed India, making it the world’s second biggest marketplace with more than 800 million connections.

Rising prosperity in select states is indeed luring India’s big business to the hinterland, prompting heavyweights such as Tatas, Birlas and Godrej to devise fresh strategies to enlarge their farm portfolios. Without exception, all these companies believe that the farm sector provides them with big growth opportunities as rural consumption outpaces urban demand.

A recent survey by Crisil revealed that for the first time in 20 years, additional spending by rural India at Rs 37.5 crore was significantly higher that that of urban dwellers at Rs 29.94 crore.

“Underpinning this growth in rural consumption is a strong rise in rural incomes due to rising non-farm employment and the government’s rural focus through employment generation schemes,” the report said.

There is a trend towards specialisation and value addition. Consider this. Rallis has compiled a digitised database of more than 700,000 Rallis Kisan Kutumb farmers whom it contacts regularly using mobile phones, Internet, newsletters or through its field staff to offer products and services. This data gives them the kind of raw market intelligence necessary to create new offerings. Farmers in some regions are given a toll-free number to discuss their issues with an agricultural expert. They aspire soon to reach out to 1 million farmers, and capture a larger share of their wallet.

Mahindra & Mahindra has built the world’s largest tractor business by volume. It achieved this a couple of years ago.

The steady and consistent performance of automaker Maruti Suzuki provides another dimension to the upbeat story. Its rural sales grew 16 percent in 2013-14. At 336,463 units, this segment comprises 32 percent of the car market leader’s total sales spread over 93,500 villages, up from 44,374 villages where the company sold its cars in 2012-13.

According to company honchos, Maruti sees its non-metro push as the drive to the future. Maruti chairman RC Bhargava says that the future growth of the automobile industry will be driven more and more by non-metro cities and rural areas.

The rural focus comes on the back of Maruti’s strategy of hitting sales of 3 million units in the longer term. Analysts say Maruti has managed to “crack” the rural market thanks to its focus on fuel efficiency and network expansion. Maruti, which has 3,000 rural service outlets, is planning to expand that network by 200 this year. It is also planning to double its 1,000-strong mobile service vans across rural markets.

Maruti’s rural thrust commenced tepidly in the slowdown of 2008, but really came good in 2013 when the car market saw its worst slowdown in a decade. While the rest of the market ground to a negative growth curve, Maruti saw its smaller and rural markets — with populations of less than 10,000 people — growing around 14-15 percent. Until 2007-08, only 4 percent of Maruti’s total sales came from rural markets. In six years, that share has multiplied to 32 percent.

“The rise in commerce in rural India is a symptom of how villages in the vicinity of urban ateas are also changing,” wrote sociologist Dipankar Gupta while analysing the 2011 Census.

The point is further elaborated by Jawaharlal Nehru University’s research associate Dilip Mohanty who has closely studied the spurt in the number of rural rich in selected pockets. “According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, there are 352 million mobile connections in rural areas,” he says. “Nearly every big village in relatively developed states is aping urban areas, both in terms of choice of non-food consumer goods and spending. In fact, there is a definite trend of rural spending on consumer goods fast outpacing urban demand.

Last year, disclosures about how more than 100 village headmen in Bihar siphoned off MGNREGA funds to line their pockets and became millionaires overnight had caused a huge furore. There are new acquisitive categories that are taking advantage of cheap institutional credit, if they can afford it.

{Cover Story of Tehelka, Vol. 11, Issue 35, 30 August, New Delhi}

Programmed To Survive: The Idea Of India Redux

{This essay is the new Introduction to the fifth edition of The Idea of India, published as a Popular Penguin on January 20. Professor Sunil Khilnani is Avantha Chair and Director, King’s India Institute, London.}

That the nation persists is what has lent the India story such gravitas: an idea that’s taken strong root. But will the march of history leave us behind? 

-Sunil Khilnani

Why India? Why, of all post-colonial nations, is India the country that gets taken most seriously by the very powers it once struggled against? Whether it is corporate Britain wooing Indian money by throwing Bollywood bling parties at London’s Claridge’s Hotel or European luxury houses like Hermes launching special sari lines for India’s glamorati or US President Obama choosing the Indian prime minister as the guest of honour for his first state banquet—the world wants a piece of India. Not since nineteenth-century America has an ex-colony moved so fast into prominence on the world stage.

Plenty of people have answers that purport to explain this phenomenon—India’s scale, its software and smartness, its strategic location. But I think the real answer is at once more subtle and more obvious. It has to do with the fact that India is still here—that, unlike many new states created after the end of the age of European empire, it has not self-destructed. What if India’s current prominence has more to do with what it has avoided, steered around, than with what it has done?

When I wrote The Idea of India in ’97, I wanted to show that the founding idea of India is anchored as much in resisting certain powerful seductions—the temptations of a clear, singular definition of nationhood, of the apparent neatness of authoritarian politics, of the clarities of a statist or pure market economy, of unambiguous alliances with other states—as it was in realising declaratory visions.

***

History moves fast these days—faster that it did when nineteenth-century America began its climb to world power, faster than when Gandhi and Nehru brought India to independence in the mid-twentieth century, and faster still than in the years since I wrote The Idea of India. In India, what were once gradual changes—the upswing of economic growth, the movement of Indians from the countryside to the city, the sabotage of the old hierarchies of the social order, the renegotiation of India’s place and status in the world—now turn at dizzying pace.

Such historical fast-tracking has taken India to a point where it is now possible to envisage a real change in the chronic conditions of deprivation and injustice that have so long entrapped most Indians. Actually altering those conditions for the better will, however, require a run of political judgement and action as momentous as that accomplished by India’s founders in the mid-twentieth century, when that remarkable generation broke India free from an authoritarian, oppressive past and set it forth in pursuit of liberty and democracy.

The grand tasks of the years ahead are daunting: managing the largest-ever rural-to-urban transition under democratic conditions; developing the human capital and sustaining the ecological and energy resources needed for participatory economic growth; contending with powerful competitor states and containing a volatile neighbourhood; defining what sort of power we wish to be in the world. It is an agenda that would test any society at the best of times. But in India’s case, these tasks will have to be achieved under severe constraints of time and choice.

Ours is a society of swiftly inflating expectations, where old deference crumbles before youthful impatience. And internationally, India must navigate a fluid arena: one where global power is rearranging itself in as yet undefined ways, where capital is restless, and where new, unforeseen threats and risks are facts of life. India will have only a sliver of time, a matter of years, in which to seize its chances. After all, the faster history moves, the more likely one is to get left behind.

Political imagination, judgement, action—the capacities that birthed India—seem to have deserted us when we need them.

The policy choices we make over the coming decade—about education, about environmental resources, about social and fiscal responsibility, about foreign affairs—will propel us down tracks that will be difficult to renounce or even revise in years to come. The aptness of those choices will depend not on India’s entrepreneurial brilliance or technological prowess, or the cheapness of its labour, but on politics. Yet, at this historical moment when emergent possibilities and new problems are crowding in, the transformative momentum of India’s politics seems to have dissipated.

Although the nation’s founders saw political freedom as their great goal, decades on, what that freedom has delivered measures up poorly for many. For India’s business leaders eager to compete with China, for the middle classes fed up by corruption, for radicalisant intellectuals, for desperate citizens who’ve taken up arms against the state, democracy in India is a story of deflating illusions, of obstacles and oppression. Democratic politics itself is seen as impeding the decisive action needed to expand economic possibilities.

It is a troubling irony: political imagination, judgement and action—the capacities that brought India into being—seem to have deserted both the air-conditioned hallways of power as well as the dusty streets of protest, just when it needs them. The distinctive source of modern India’s legitimacy has, to many, become an agent of the country’s ills.

India’s democratic discontent echoes a wider disaffection. Across the globe, democratic politics is in distress and disrepair. It is being challenged in its homelands, from the US to Europe to Japan, while in Russia and China, it stands summarily dismissed. As citizens grow ever more contemptuous of their leaders, leaders readily return the compliment—complaining that they are hamstrung by the short-sighted, unrealistic demands of their citizenry. Just a couple of decades after democracy was proclaimed as the universal future—the riddle of human history solved—it seems fragile, ineffectual, contingent.

In India, the impatience with democracy is perhaps not unreasonable, given how quickly we have moved in such a short time, and how much further we wish to get. But one way to understand the possibilities that democracy alone can underwrite is to remember the context that existed in India at the time that I wrote The Idea of India.

***

I was motivated, then, by a different kind of concern about India’s democracy: a kind of majoritarianism, it seemed, might threaten our foundational commitment to diversity and pluralism.

In the mid-’90s, India had emerged from a deep economic crisis, only to be ensnared in battles over identity. What sort of a nation were we? Which groups or cultures had the right to claim special privileges? Religion, caste, region: all were vigorously advanced as answers.

These answers seemed bent on blurring, even dissolving, the idea of India—the constitutive idea of this “unnatural nation”. It was that idea that I sought to recover, in hopes of showing how it had made India and kept it going. Part of the burden of my argument was that India’s politics was proliferating a variety of ideas about India, some in contradiction and collision with one another. The Indian idea had itself become a proudly plural one—a measure as good as any of the original idea’s success. And amidst that plurality were, perhaps inevitably, some conceptions that sought to singularise India’s many religious and cultural identities and make it a narrower place.

Today, in many parts of the country, those battles seem to have played themselves out—so much blood under the bridge, or down the Sabarmati, as it were. The conventional view is that India’s economic surge has stilled those fights over identity. And although there is some truth in that explanation, it is too partial a perception. It does not address, for instance, why one of India’s most developed and fast-growing states, the calendar girl of big business—Gujarat—is also the purveyor of India’s most chauvinistic and poisonous politics.

It is the capacity of India’s democracy to articulate and incite its diversity that has saved it from civil conflict.

In fact, what has at least for an interval calmed such politics has been the workings, however rickety, of democratic politics. It is the capacity of India’s representative democracy to articulate, and even to incite, India’s diversity, to give voice to differing interests and ideas of self, rather than merely to aggregate supposed common identities, that has saved India from the civil conflict and auto-destruction typical of so many states. Many of those states have been in fact smaller and less diverse than India. Consider for a start, the ragged history of India’s regional neighbours. The desire to impose a common identity has broken them down.

What has protected India from such outcomes is not any innate Indian virtue or cultural uniqueness. Rather, it is the outcome of a political invention, the intricate architecture of constitutional democracy established by its founders. That constitutional democracy has prevented monolithic outcomes in India. It has stalled zealots in their tracks, penned demagogues to their corrals and taken the wind out of populist sails—just as it has also frustrated and slowed more positive or desirable outcomes. But that is the crucial, under-recognised value of such a system: its capacity not to achieve the good, but to prevent the worse.

***

Democracy’s singular, rather astonishing achievement has been to keep India united as a political space. And now that space has become a vast market whose strength lies in its internal diversity and dynamism. It is that vast market, of considerable attraction to international capital, that is today one of India’s greatest comparative advantages—and one that makes India a potential engine of the global economy.

In the years ahead, whether the old battles over identity stay becalmed will to a large extent depend on the capacity of India’s political system to sustain and spread the country’s new growth. Rising disparities in income, wealth and opportunity are a global fact, but they can be particularly acute in growing economies. For twenty-first century India, as economic growth spreads unevenly over the productive landscape, the big questions will turn onto the disequalising effects of economic transformation. This isn’t a question that any society, democratic or despotic, has been able to solve, let alone any rapidly growing society—and certainly not China.

The project of devising workable alternatives to market capitalism has animated much of the politics and history of the past two centuries. But that project did not on the whole fare impressively. The collapse of revolutionary dreams symbolised by the events of 1989 and immediately after has been followed by slow punctures in the wheels of Western social democracy. And yet, the lived conditions that gave rise to such political hopes—revolutionary or reformist—remain as intense and painful as ever, not least in the world’s two major growth economies, China and India. Part of what it must mean, therefore, for states like India and China to take their place as major world powers must rest on their ability to invent better alternative models of market capitalism.

For India, developing such alternatives must be a priority in coming years. It is imperative for India’s economic future that the global disaffection with market capitalism does not take wider hold in the country. We shall need, somehow, to strike a balance between, on the one hand, redistributive social policies and regulation and, on the other hand, the need to keep the economy open, markets functioning, and incentives alive.

Most people in India remain hopeful that their turn will come. Yet as I write this, thousands of protesters have taken to the streets and squares of the world’s financial centres, from NY and London to Frankfurt and Hong Kong, hoping to change the skewed order of global capitalism. Such dissidence is a reminder that the tolerance for disparities, for inequality, can shift sharp and sudden.

In India’s case, just as six decades and more of democracy have broken down age-old structures of deference and released a new defiant energy, so too years of rapid but uneven growth may, before we are quite ready to acknowledge it, dismantle the intricate self-deceptions that have so far kept India’s grotesque disparities protected from mass protest. As the Indian political classes exercise their populist instincts, corporate India, heady with new opulence, lately comports itself like a well-plumed sitting duck. Without renewed political imagination and judgement, the disaffection and alienation of those who are being left out or actively dispossessed by rapid growth could change the course of our history.

Can India’s democracy rise up to the task of rectifying this sorry state of affairs—accommodate the dispossessed and channel discontent into political forms? Most importantly, can India’s democracy be rescued from its current function as an acclamatory mechanism to instal new leaders? Is it possible to turn that democracy into something that makes political responsibility more legible, and also enables those who hold power to invest in the country’s long future?

In the twentieth century, India was a striking example of post-colonial reinvention. We might now, in the new century, turn our thoughts to practising a more effective democracy and a more inclusive market capitalism—in contrast to China, where wealth amasses and democracy remains a bad coin.

The transformational opportunities that India confronts today have their origins in the life and story that unfolds in my book, The Idea of India. As India moves forward in coming years, ever more forgetful of its history, those origins and that story will matter more than ever. For, even when nations pride themselves on their freedom from the past, it is often in fact their beginnings—their founding spirit and imagination—that remain, in very altered worlds, their greatest resource.

{Originally in print, Outlook, Essay, on Feb 06, 2012}

'Madras' The colonial city: T.S. Subramanian

The colonial city now called Chennai turns 375 on August 22. A survey of its growth and transformation from the time Fort St. George came up. By T.S. SUBRAMANIAN

AUGUST 22, 2014, will mark the 375th birthday of Madras, whose modern history begins on August 22, 1639.

On that day, Francis Day, a factor of the English East India Company, received a grant from Venkatadri Nayak of Wandiwash, who ruled the region under the Vijayanagara empire, to build a fort on a tongue of land on the seafront between the Cooum river in the south and the “Elampore river” in the north. When the first stone of the Fort was laid on March 1, 1640, the seeds of Madras, the first city of modern India, were sown.

Madras appeared on the stage of world history when the French attacked Fort St. George in 1746, captured it from the English and held it until 1749. Also in 1746, a small contingent of French troops on the banks of the Adyar river, aided by artillery fire, chased away several thousands of sepoys of the Nawab of Carnatic. Egmore, in the heart of Madras, saw some deadly action, too. To quote the late N.S. Ramaswami: “In the 18th century, Hyder Ali’s cavalry ranged over it and in the previous century, the Dutch sacked it” (Indian Express, June 13, 1983). San Thome was also a seat of war, but in much earlier times. In 1558, Ramaraja, the Vijayanagara ruler, led a big army to San Thome and crushed the Portuguese forces after he heard that Portuguese Franciscan friars had destroyed several Hindu temples in San Thome and Mylapore.

Pioneering role

Madras was a pioneer in several fields. As S. Muthiah, the passionate chronicler of Madras, is proud of saying, it was in Fort St. George in 1664 that India’s first Western-style hospital was established. That led to the founding of the General Hospital in 1835. The founding of the Governor’s Bank in 1635 led to modern banking. The first municipal corporation outside Britain was set up in Madras in 1688 when Elihu Yale was the Governor of Fort St. George. “In the 1670s, Governors William Langhorne and Streynsham Master instituted the rules of governance and record-keeping in Fort St. George and laid the foundations for today’s government formalities,” says Muthiah in his article titled “Pioneering Contribution of Madras”, published in 1993 in a volume titled Aspects of Madras: A Historical Perspective, which was edited by G.J. Sudhakar. It was in Madras that India’s first Western-type school, St. Mary’s Charity School, was established in 1715. The founding of the first Government Survey School, that is, the first institution for technical education east of Europe, was in Madras in 1794. The Survey School burgeoned into College of Engineering, Guindy.

The monumental scientific expedition called The Great Trigonometrical Survey, led by William Lambton, began from a church in St. Thomas Mount, Madras, on April 10, 1802. When it was completed, the shape and size of India was known. It revealed the Himalayas as the tallest mountain range in the world. Michael Topping established the first astronomical observatory in India in 1792 in Madras. The genesis of the Indian Army was in Cuddalore and in Madras after Major Stringer Lawrence raised a native infantry regiment to repulse the French attacks in the late 1740s on Fort St. David in Cuddalore. Muthiah has recorded in Madras Rediscovered that the “first rail track in India was laid for demonstration purposes near Chintadripet Bridge in 1836”. As Muthiah says: “By the time the second half of the 19th century came along, there was little left for Madras to introduce in India. But it continued to make its contribution. There was Indo-Saracenic to be left for architectural posterity in many parts of the country through the efforts of Robert Chisholm and Henry Irwin….”

How it all started

After receiving his “firman”, the document of authorisation from Venkatadri Nayak and his brother Ayappa Nayak to build a fort, Day left for Masulipatnam to persuade Andrew Cogan, his superior and the Agent of the East India Company from now on) there, that his decision to build a fort was sound. Cogan readily accepted the idea.

What first led Day to that strip of land on the beach in July 1639 was the availability of “excellent long cloth and better, cheaper by 20 per cent, than anywhere else”, including at Masulipatnam, then the rich emporia of the kingdom of Golconda. The English had already established a “factory” or a warehouse in 1611 at Masulipatnam to store the area’s famous “painted cloth”, cotton fabric with hand-painted designs. Trade in painted cloth was very lucrative and several European countries sailed the high seas to scout for sites on India’s eastern coast where they could buy and store painted cloth, and then export it.

Before the arrival of the English at Masulipatnam, the Portuguese were at San Thome in Madraspatnam in 1522, the Dutch at Masulipatnam in 1605 and at Pulicat, and the Danes at Tranquebar in 1620. The French founded Pondicherry after the English had settled in Madras in 1639. The Dutch were also at Sadras, 60 km from present-day Chennai, where weavers made excellent cloth. The English were already in Surat in 1599.

N.S. Ramaswami, in his book The Founding of Madras, first published in 1977 by Orient Longman, says: “This cotton cloth, which carried elaborate designs, was unique of its kind in the century. India was still ‘the only country in the world which could dye vegetable fibre (that is, cotton, as distinct from linen) in fast and luminous colours, so that when the fabric was washed, these colours increased rather than diminished in beauty and subtlety. Moreover, such Indian fabrics had the additional advantage of being extremely cheap in terms of contemporary trade values.’” The hand-painted cloth was made at many centres on the east coast, but Masulipatnam was preferred for its finish. Its bright colours resulted from a mordant extracted from the madder plant, which grew near the mouth of the Krishna river.

At Masulipatnam, the English had to face not only the harassment by officers of the Golconda ruler but also the hostility of the Dutch. The English bought an old fort at Armagon (present-day Durgarayapatnam in Nellore district) and rebuilt it, but no cloth was manufactured at Armagon. Besides, the local Nayak harassed the English there. The Dutch did not allow the English to settle at Pulicat.

So Day was hunting for a site on the eastern coast where cotton textiles were manufactured. During his first landing at Madraspatnam on July 27, 1639, he met Venkatadri and Ayappa, weavers and painting artists, and was happy to find that cloth was cheaper in Madras by about 20 per cent than elsewhere on the east coast. He received the firman to build a fort there, in August that year.

Chennapatnam and Madraspatnam already existed to the north and the south of the site respectively. Venkatadri and Ayappa had set up a small town a few years earlier and named it Chennapatnam, after their father, Chennappa. Venkatadri’s brother-in-law was the Vijayanagara king Venkata III.

Whence Madras?

There are several theories about the origin of the name Madraspatnam, later shortened to Madras. The most plausible one is that it was named after a wealthy Portuguese family, Madra by name, which had settled at San Thome in the 16th or 17th century. The Madra family rebuilt the St. Lazarus Church at Mylapore in 1637. A tombstone in the church found in 1927 says in Portuguese that it was “the grave of Manuel Madras and of his mother, son of Vincente Madra and of Lucy Brague” and that “they built this church at their own expense in the year 637” [1637].

Professor K.V. Raman, former Head of the Department of Ancient History and Archaeology, University of Madras, asserted: “Madras was a term used only after the Portuguese and the British came here. Earlier, it was a [loose] conglomeration of villages such as Mylapore, Triplicane, Egmore, Thiruvottiyur, Thiruvanmiyur, and so on. Madras city, as a nomenclature, obtained only after these villages joined together and came under European influence.” Cogan and Day dismantled the fort at Armagon and sailed out in Eagle, which was accompanied by Unity. It was a motley group which sailed in the two vessels, comprising 25 soldiers, factors, writers, a gunner, a surgeon, a carpenter, smiths, and so on—all of them Europeans, including the English and the Portuguese. Nagabhattan, the Company’s gunpowder maker, was perhaps the sole Indian. They arrived on February 20, 1640, at Madraspatnam. Thus was laid the foundation of the British Empire.

It, however, was not smooth sailing for Day after the first stone for building the fortified warehouse was laid on March 1. The Company was reluctant to finance the building of the fort. “Spending considerably out of his own pocket, Day built on this barren stretch of no-man’s sand fortifying walls that enclosed a 100 yard by 100 square,” says Muthiah, in his article titled “City begat by Fort St. George”, published in The Hindu on April 30, 1990. “And within those walls, he erected a warehouse and 15 thatched houses. When that work was completed in April 1640, Andrew Cogan, Day’s chief and the Company’s Agent on the Coromandel, christened the tiny settlement, on St. George’s Day, April 24, Fort St. George,” adds Muthiah.

The first building to come up inside the Fort was Fort House, which was the Governor’s residence. It had a dome which has not survived. A “White Town” came up inside the Fort where English and Portuguese traders lived. A “Black Town” came up outside, north of the Fort, where artisans, craftsmen and traders lived. St. Mary’s Church, the country’s first Protestant Church, was built inside the Fort in 1680 (or 1678). The Fort House was pulled down in the 1690s and a new one built. It houses the Tamil Nadu government’s Secretariat and the Assembly now.

“During the 17th and 18th centuries, Madras began to grow within and outside Fort St. George, with the acquisition of several adjoining villages,” says P.S. Sriraman, Superintending Archaeologist, Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), Jodhpur Circle, who authored the ASI-published pamphlet “Fort St. George”. “Early in the 18th century, the ‘Grand House on Charles Street’, Clive’s house, was built. A 1710 map shows a mint, a hospital, a storehouse and a town hall (next to St. Mary’s). Besides, it indicates the names of the roads within the fort and in the Black Town. A parade ground was added….”

Sriraman says: “From 1756 to 1763, hectic construction saw the fort to its present shape…. In its final form, Fort St. George spreads over 42 acres… and has three principal gates, the two Sea Gates and the Wallajah Gate and St. George’s Gate, and a few minor gates. These gates were strengthened by bastions, ravelins and lunettes. A wet ditch was excavated all round. The walls were casemated (a vaulted chamber built in the walls) and cisterns were built to support about 6,000 men with water supply. The entire construction was done at a cost of Rs.7,700,000 at that time. Of course, this expenditure was not without its share of controversy.”

G. Maheshwari, Superintending Archaeologist, ASI, said the organisation’s Chennai Circle has prepared a plan to restore Last House on Snob’s Alley in Fort St. George. A portion of Last House was in ruins. Indian Institute of Technology Madras will help the ASI in restoring Last House, which has a beautiful carved, wooden staircase inside. The conservation effort will be true to the original plan and elevation of the structure, she said. Cement will not be used.

Amid war and strife

When Day began building the fort in 1640, war alarms were ringing everywhere in the region. The Vijayanagara empire was on the decline. Venkata III died in 1642 and was succeeded by Sriranga III, who ruled from 1642 to 1649. There was intense rivalry among the various Nayaks, who were the governors of the Vijayanagara kingdom. The Nayaks had their own private militias. Venkatadri commanded 20,000 sepoys. The Turks had invaded south India in the 14th century and the Sultan of Golconda in the 17th century. The Maratha warrior Chhatrapathi Shivaji and his forces were marching through Madras in 1740.

N.S. Ramaswami says in his Founding of Madras: “The fortunes of the Englishmen at Fort St. George were subject to the political changes on the eastern coast, which were considerable. The region passed first from Vijayanagar to Golconda and thence from Golconda to the Mughals. At every change, the English had to have their privileges confirmed. Fort St. George was involved in an uphill struggle for quite some time in its early career.” A letter from Fort St. George written to the Company directors in London talks about the “country being all in broils….”

Despite this turbulent situation, for several decades after the construction of Fort St. George began in 1640, the British were interested only in trade. The Fort was used as a warehouse for storing textiles, timber and so on. At best, it was a fortified garrison.

French attack

But the French attack on Fort St. George in September 1746 shook the British. The war between England and France in Europe had its fallout in Madras. Although an English naval squadron sent to India reached the Coromandel coast and it could have attacked the French settlement of Pondicherry, whose Governor was Francois Dupleix, it did not do so. But de la Bourdonnais, the French Governor of Bourbon in Mauritius, had no such compunction. He came to the aid of Dupleix. De la Bourdonnais’ fleet appeared before Fort St. George on September 3, 1746, and shelled it from the sea. “Governor Morse [of Fort St. George] and the garrison surrendered. The formal surrender took place on September 10th,” says Vedagiri Shanmugasundaram, in his article titled “History (1600-1900), published in Madras, Chennai: A 400-year Record of the First City of Modern India.

Dupleix carted away merchandise, stores, bullion and ordnance valued at Rs.2 million to Pondicherry. Even the highly polished black pillars of Fort House were taken to Pondicherry. Later, the English brought back the pillars and used them when they rebuilt Fort House. The French destroyed much of Black Town.

The Nawab of the Carnatic, Anwaruddin, the suzerain of both the English and the French merchants on the east coast sent an army under his eldest son, Mahfuz Khan, to confront the French occupiers of the Fort. A small contingent of the French soldiers beat back the Nawab’s army.

Shanmugasundaram says: “When the English lost Madras, Fort St. David (Cuddalore) became the seat of their presidency. Dupleix launched several attacks against it but failed to take it. Meanwhile, the war in Europe had ended with the signing of the Aix-la-Chapelle. Soon afterwards, Madras was to be restored in return for Quebec (Canada). The rendition of the city to the English took place on August 21, 1749.”

The French occupation of Fort St. George convinced the British that they should raise a strong army of their own and that they should fortify Fort St. George in an impregnable manner. Major Stringer Lawrence, who had successfully defended Fort St. David, raised a regiment of native soldiers in Cuddalore and Madras, which metamorphosed into the Indian Army. Soon Robert Clive came into the picture. Meanwhile, the British systematically set about strengthening Fort St. George. Hostilities erupted again. Comte de Lally, the French Governor General of India and a soldier himself, besieged Fort St. George in December 1758. The siege went on for 67 days. The French lifted the siege when a British fleet arrived in Madras. The Fort was in ruins again after the siege. The Company started restoring it with ramparts, bastions and ravelins. The work was completed in 1783 when the Fort’s present shape was reached.

Mysore Wars 

Then, the Mysore Wars broke out. Hyder Ali, the Mysore ruler, attacked Madras. His army defeated the combined forces of the English, the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Marathas. Hyder Ali’s army looted San Thome and other villages. Hyder Ali audaciously dictated a treaty within the walls of Fort St. George, by which he gained a lot of territory.

With the death of Tipu Sultan, son of Hyder Ali, in the fourth Anglo-Mysore War in 1799, there was no more any threat to the British in the Indian subcontinent. The British subjugated the local rulers by playing them off against each other and extracted from them the right to collect taxes. For instance, the Nawab of Arcot bestowed upon the English the right to collect revenue from his subjects. Soon, the English found that this was more lucrative than trading in painted cloth, timber or spices!

As Fort St. George grew, and Chennapatnam and Madraspatnam expanded, the three got integrated to become Madras. This involved the British acquiring a number of villages, including Mylapore-Triplicane, using threats, chicanery and blandishment.

Shanmugasundaram says in his “History (1600-1900)”: “As a consequence of Governor Yale applying for additional possessions as free grants, conditional grants were obtained in early 1693 from the Mughal emperor for the villages of Egmore, Purasawalkam and Tondiarpet. The three villages were the earliest acquisitions after Triplicane and the four came to be known in the records as ‘the Old Towns’. In turn, the Governor leased out these villages for an annual rent to the Company’s Chief Merchants.”

In 1708, the Mughal Nawab Daud Khan handed over Thiruvottiyur, Nungambakkam, Vyasarpadi, Kathiwakkam and Sattangadu to the British by a firman. They were called “the five New Villages”. When Daud Khan later demanded, during the Governorship of Edward Harrison from 1711 to 1717, the return of these five villages, “a gift of 400 bottles of liquor to Khan was found so acceptable that not only was the grant of the villages confirmed but 40 acres of land near St. Thomas Mount was given in addition for the construction of a garden house”. Mylapore, San Thome, Triplicane and Egmore came under the English fold.

An ancient lineage

The history of Madras, however, is not limited to just 375 years. It has an ancient history going back to the beginning of the historic period, that is, the Tamil Sangam age (the first century B.C. to the third century A.D.). Sangam works refer to Mylapore. In his book The Early History of the Madras Region, K.V. Raman says: “Mylapore was a port. It has been mentioned by Roman geographer Ptolemy as Mylafa. In the first century A.D., Mylapore was an important commercial centre, attracting foreign traders.” Tamil Sangam literature has mentioned Mylapore as Mylarpil. “Triplicane came under Mylapore. Importantly, it was not merely called Triplicane but Mylapore-Triplicane,” Raman said. Mylapore and Triplicane are noted for their Kapalisvara and Parthasarathy Swamy temples.

R. Nagaswamy, former Director, Tamil Nadu Archaeology Department, attested to the importance of Mylapore in the Madras region. “During the period of the Pallava ruler Nandivarman III [regnal years A.D. 844-866], Mylapore was a port town. The Tamil work, Nandikalambagam, composed anonymously in praise of him, calls Mylapore a port town. Nandivarman was in fact called ‘Mylai kaavalar’, that is, the ruler of Mylai,” Nagaswamy said.

After the first phase of the Sangam Cholas’ rule in the Madras region in the first century A.D., first under Karikala Chola and later by Tondaiman Ilam Tirayan, Madras was under the Pallavas from the fourth century A.D. to the 9th century A,D. “The earliest inscription to be found in Madras is at Pallavaram. It belongs to the Pallava ruler Mahendravarman I [regnal years A.D. 600-630],” said Nagaswamy. Mahendravarman I inscribed 67 titles or cognomens or birudas that he assumed in a Siva temple that he carved out of rock at Pallavaram. The inscription is in the Pallava-Grantha script. The language of the inscription is mostly Telugu and some titles are in Sanskrit and Tamil. The inscription commences by mentioning his name, “Sri Mahendravikrama”. Some of his colourful titles that were inscribed are Mattavilasah, Chetrakari, Vichitra Chittah, Kalahapriya and Lalitankura. The Siva temple in the rock-cut cave is now a dargah.

The second phase of Chola rule in the Madras region was under the imperial Cholas, from around A.D. 900 (Aditya Chola) until the end of the Chola empire in A.D. 1285. Akin to Mylapore, Egmore (Ezhumur) has an interesting history of about 1,000 years. Two inscriptions in the Parthasarathy temple at Triplicane mention “Ezhumur”, said Nagaswamy. The earlier one, dated A.D. 1309, belongs to the Pandya king Kulasekhara Pandya. It talked about “Ezhumur nadu” which fell under “Puliyur kottam” (divison) of “Jayamkonda Chola mandalam”. It mentioned how “Ayanpuram kizhavan” (the chief of the Ayanpuram village, which is the present-day Aynavaram) sold land to raise funds to provide for offerings to the deity of the Parthasarathy temple. The second inscription, belonging to the Vijayanagara period of the 16th century, also spoke about how Ezhumur came under “Puliyur kottam” which, in turn, fell under “Jayamkonda Chola mandalam”.

But Egmore’s 18th century history, after it came under the Company’s control, is not so sedate. “Square mile for square mile, Egmore is the part of Madras which has seen more war and contention than any other,” says N.S. Ramaswami in his article “Fighting Egmore”, in his column “Coral Strand” that appeared in Indian Expresson June 20, 1983. “Among its unwelcome visitors, sword in hand, were the French, the Dutch and the Mysore troops of Hyder Ali. It has been plundered, farmed out, fought for and [it] overenjoyed the doubtful joys of a ‘metta’ or a toll station.”

Indeed, Egmore was both a seat of war and a health resort with a “fine air”. The Company built a minor fort, called a redoubt, in Egmore. The redoubt had a unit for making gunpowder. A choultry, built earlier, had a guardhouse added to it. This choultry was to be a health resort for the sepoys of the Company—it was to provide “a great relief to the poor soldiers when sick and contribute to saving their lives”.

Soon, the British built a Pantheon, or public assembly rooms, in Egmore. Many garden houses came up. Nagaswamy said “the most important point is that the British had a vision” when they systematically developed the infrastructure required for Madras. For instance, “the British built a railway station, a museum, a library, a theatre, a zoo and a record office, all at Egmore”. The small zoo at Egmore featured two tigers. While Dr Edward Balfour was the founder of the Government Museum in Egmore, Dr F.H. Gravely gave it a proper shape.

Fort and away

With flourishing trade and a strong army, Madras boomed. The Englishmen left the Fort to build for themselves bungalows away from the sea, on Mount Road and Poonamalee High Road, and at Egmore, Mylapore, Adyar and Guindy. Egmore was the favourite. Wealthy Indians lived in Luz. These bungalows, known as garden houses, had “high colonnades, projecting open porticos, open corridors and triangular pediments in front”. As William Hodges, who visited Madras in 1781, observed: “The English town, rising from within Fort St. George has, from the sea, a rich and beautiful appearance…. The buildings consist of long colonnades with open porticos and flat roofs and offer to the eye an appearance similar to what he may conceive of a Grecian city.”

Madras had castles too: Brodie’s Castle and Leith Castle. Brodie’s Castle was built by James Brodie, an “outstanding civil servant” of the Company, on 11 acres assigned to him in 1796. It is a beautiful bungalow, built on the banks of the Adyar river, on Greenways Road. It is now home to the Tamil Nadu Music and Fine Arts University. Leith Castle, situated in San Thome, was built by James Leith, another civil servant of the Company. It is a private residential house now.

This is how Steen Bille found Madras when he visited it in 1845: “One can drive and ride as one will. The roads are excellent, one flies one’s way; the air we breathe is balmic and invigorating. We can drive past one villa after another and all are situated in beautifully laid-out and well-kept parks and gardens.”

{Source: Frontline, Commemorative Issue, Chennai at 375, September 5, 2014}