Civilization's crisis
Source: By Samantak Das: The Telegraph
Michael Madhusudan Dutt's 1854 pronouncement, in The Anglo- Saxon and the Hindu , " Long before the blind beggar Homer told the tale of ' Troy divine' enchanting the fair land of Greece — bards as sublime, breathing music as sonorous, as dulcet, had built the lofty rhyme in Hindustan!", is an early example of a modern Indian celebrating the glories of ancient Hindustan. More would follow in the years after MMD. Rabindranath Tagore's assertion that the West's only hope of salvation from its habit, " whenever confronted with non- western races in a close contact", to take recourse to " extermination or expulsion by physical force", and European nations' only hope of overcoming their violent tendency to be " perpetually making preparations for deadly combats, wherein entire populations indulge in orgies of wholesale destruction unparalleled in ferocity", lay in learning from India's experience of spiritual accommodation and reconciliation struck a powerful chord when he articulated Vision of India's History in 1923.
Both Madhusudan and Rabindranath were engaging with and trying to make sense of colonization, with the older poet celebrating the arrival of the Anglo- Saxon whose " glorious mission" was " to regenerate, to renovate the Hindu race!" while Rabindranath, typically, was more concerned with providing a salutary corrective to such uncritical celebrations of European puissance. In both instances, even if there are significant differences in temperament and attitude, the seriousness of intellectual engagement with matters of vital social and political import cannot be denied.
Both essays critically analyse the fact and significance of colonial dominance and seek to accommodate the Indian experience within a larger, global perspective. Most importantly perhaps, both are predicated on the belief that the exercise of intellect and reason will be able to throw light on the past, explicate the present and make logical projections into possible futures. Consider, in contrast, what seems to be happening here, now. A prime minister who tells a gathering of scientists and doctors that Karna's birth and Ganesha's elephant- head are instances of ancient Indian expertise in making test tube babies and plastic surgery, respectively, and suggesting that Gandhari's one hundred sons were the products of successful stem- cell research; the education minister of Rajasthan claiming that the " holy" Indian cow both inhales as well as exhales oxygen; a leading ideologue, the prime mover behind the banning of Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History , claiming " whether it be the first spacecraft, television or car, or plastic surgery, or rockets there's nothing that wasn't conceived, designed and executed by Indians aeons ago" ( Dinanath Batra in Outlook , October 6 2014); and an MP and former chief minister who states that the sage, Kanad, had conducted a nuclear test roughly lakhs of years ago.
What binds these later statements and distinguishes them from the pronouncements of Madhusudan and Rabindranath is the barely disguised attempt to 'glorify' India, never mind if such glorification has evoked as much mirth as it has bolstered nationalistic pride. And therein lies the rub. For underpinning such apparently bizarre statements is a certain notion of what constitutes nationalism and, perhaps more crucially, what makes for anti - nationalism, seen as a wholly ' Hindu' figuring of India's past. In this scheme of things, Indian (= Hindu) civilization has been one of unparalleled genius, trampled upon and desecrated by foreign invaders, from the base ( Persian, Arabic) Mussalman to the ignoble ( European) Christian.
For such latter- day chauvinists, it seems to be a truth universally acknowledged that India that is Bharat is the greatest civilization the world has seen, is seeing, or will ever see. Anything the world can do, we can do, and have done, bigger, better, and much before anyone else. Philosophers have only interpreted India in various ways, they say; the point, however, is to reclaim its properly Hindu spirit.
Human social organization, as Sigmund Freud pointed out in his discussion of Civilization and Its Discontents, back in 1930, is a means of repressing our libidinal instincts and controlling our desire for sex and violence for the sake of safety and security. In the eternal struggle between Thanatos, the death- instinct, which Freud saw as hardwired into all human beings as an essential component of the " pleasure principle", and the principle of Eros or love, which gives rise to civilization, there is always the danger that Thanatos will prevail.
This is particularly true in eras of crisis ( such as the one Freud himself was living through), when one is forced to confront the overwhelming question, "[ M] ay we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization — possibly the whole of mankind — have become ' neurotic'?" One way of escaping from this neurosis is to throw off the shackles of civilization and deny the restrictions that civilization imposes on a human being's instinctual desire for violence and sex. "In fact," Freud tells us, “primitive man was better off in knowing no restrictions of instinct." The neurotic individual seeks a target, a focus, for his unhappiness. Once this source is located, it is a small step to work towards its (preferably violent) destruction.
This, more or less, is what happened to the Jews in Hitler's Germany: unhappy, neurotic Germans found the "septic focus" for their unhappiness in the figure of the greedy, unclean Jew, posited the uncontaminated “pure, Aryan" German as counterpoint and well, one need not dwell on what happened next. But this, alas, is what seems to be happening in India now.
Our neurotic civilization — the child of a global system that thrives on insecurity and fear— has seen the rise of the strong, nationalistic leader in country after country across the world. As the intermeshing and interconnectedness of the global economy, of manufacturing processes and intellectual property rights, grow, one sees the rise of leaders who prey upon these neurotic fears and offer the pabulum of national grandeur and virulent anti-' foreigner' rhetoric to win friends and influence voters from among the increasingly impoverished and increasingly neurotic masses.
When, at one end of the spectrum, a respected doctor who one went to school with declares, in all seriousness, " Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims," and, on the other end, the chairperson of the Indian Council of Historical Research claims that the iconic ' Dancing Girl' figurine from Harappa is none other than the Hindu goddess, Parvati, one can perceive the forces of distrust, suspicion, hatred, xenophobia and unreason slowly but surely taking root. The same man who wrote of the unparalleled ferocity of Western nations, and whose last public talk was called "Civilization's Crisis ( Sabhyatar Sankat )", nevertheless, warned that to lose faith in humanity was a sin. I wonder, had he been alive, what he would have said now.
