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Demystifying the Spirit of IndiaBy Aditi Bhaduri
In the Indian experience the author finds hope even for the world that is probably more familiar to him, that is, Iran. At a time when any assertion on the role that India has played in shaping world civilisation or even the most innocuous statement expressing pride in anything Indian is dismissed as 'jingoism' and 'dangerous nationalism' by our liberals and intellectuals, Ramin Jahanbegloo's offering titled The Spirit of India can be called not only patronising but even provocative. As Asish Nandy writes in the foreword, "Few university-based academics today will dare title their book, 'The Spirit of India'… it smacks of a particular type of pre-war scholarship ... Such enterprises have now been exiled from the social sciences…" Jahanbegloo not only dares to title his book thus, but does so with conviction. There is no philosophical hubris colouring his endeavour, nor is it Indian nationalism that Jahanbegloo pays a tribute to in this collection of essays. It is the spirit of dialogue that Indians have engaged in since the dawn of their civilisation– in many ways the only ancient civilisation that is alive today– that is the central theme here, embodying the very soul and spirit of the country for Jahanbegloo. This Indian volksgeist is the focus of the author's attention and he pays homage to those whom he sees as the inheritors, propagators and transmitters of this dialogue. This may have something to do with where Jahanbegloo comes from. Ramin Jahanbegloo, Iranian philosopher and currently Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, was the director of Centre for Contemporary Studies at the Cultural Research Bureau in Tehran from 2002-006. In April 2006 he was arrested and detained at Tehran's Evin prison on charges of spying and preparing a velvet revolution. The Spirit of India is his first book after his release. As Nandy writes, "Jahanbegloo's own affair with India is also a painful, unacknowledged conversation with that unhappy country, Iran, where a ruthless, despotic ruling class and clergy has been trying desperately to freeze the relationship among politics, culture and faith" The key question throughout history has been: What should our behaviour towards others be in order to achieve harmony and solidarity? The author finds that "One of the most time-honoured assertions about the spirit of India is that it is the embodiment of human solidarity"— the reason for her democratic maturity. Jahanbegloo's perception that India "has never been a monolithic, static and rigid civilisation" where 'dogmatism and fundamentalism' have not been the final winners of the cross-community and intercultural debate in India' informs his choice of those whom he sees as personifying and propagating the country's spirit. All personalities critically viewed, eulogised and quoted are those who have engaged with the West, articulating, informing and universalising Indian thought, while entering into civilisational dialogue with it, even while resisting Western domination. Since dialogue ultimately implies non-violence, it is but predictable that the book begins with a tribute to the Mahatma (who considered ahimsa to be Hinduism's greatest gift to mankind). Subsequent chapters talk about Vinoba Bhave, Nehru, Tagore, Satyajit Ray, Radhakrishnan, Sri Aurobindo, Abul Kalam Azad and Anand Coomaraswamy. Frontier Gandhi There is a moving tribute to the Frontier Gandhi, forgotten and erased from the political memory of Pakistan, the country that became his and where he lived his later years and ultimately breathed his last in. Yet, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan became the first non-Indian recipient of the Bharat Ratna, India's highest state award; no doubt an act that Jahanbegloo sees as yet another affirmation of the spirit of India. Jahanbegloo is aware that, ahimsa and dialogue notwithstanding, diversity has been a source of violence and dissension in India, but that has not "…defied the idea, among different communities in India, to speak 'to the others'." In the Indian experience the author finds hope even for the world that is probably more familiar to him. In the lives and thoughts of Frontier Gandhi and Abul Kalam Azad, Jahanbegloo finds reason to believe that a tolerant Islam and a Muslim Gandhi are not illusions. Implied, throughout, is that the spirit of India had been articulated even before these personalities brought their light into the world; they were inheritors of this spirit and propagated it with local and global resonances. But, surely the spirit of India cannot be articulated in singularly male terms? It has burst forth, resisting all gender oppressions, and articulated itself whether in the vaks of Lala Ded (Laleshwari) and in the bhajans of Mirabai or in the more recent works of Amrita Pritam and Mahasweta Devi. Nevertheless, we find Jahanbegloo's endeavours for what they are worth. As a non-Indian he is enviously free of the baggage of the Indian brand of political correctness. He, therefore, is able to unhesitatingly underscore or stress that which many Indians would shy away from today. His essay on Nehru, for instance, contains the following quote: "I have often wondered what if our race forgot the Buddha, the Upanishads and the great epics, what then will it be like? It would be uprooted and would lose the basic characteristics…India would cease to be India." About Radhakrishnan he says, "Though refusing the idea of an Indian monopoly of wisdom, he maintained that the message of Hinduism was worthy of universal application." The Spirit of India gently nudges us to renew our pledge as the inheritors of this unique spirit, for, in Coomaraswamy's words, "The greatness of men lies in their beliefs, not in the multiplicity of things they disbelieve." And even as we grope, trying to find our way, caught as we are between growing religious dogmatism and 'rationalist fundamentalism', Jahanbegloo reminds us what Dr Radhakrishnan so beautifully articulated: "The destiny of Man is to know himself".
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I can't go on, says Beckett's Unnamable. I will go on. A writer's injuries are his strengths, and from his wounds will flow his sweetest, most startling dreams.
And Proust, too, killing himself to write his book comes close to the concept of dharma when, echoing Balzac, he says that in the end it's less the desire for fame than 'the habit of laboriousness' that takes a writer to the end of a work. But dharma, as this ideal of truth to oneself, or living out the truth in oneself, can also be used to reconcile men to servitude and make them find in paralyzing obedience the highest spiritual good. 'And do thy duty, even if it be humble,' says the Aryan Gita,
'rather than another's, even it be great. To die on one's duty is life: to live in another' death.
My discovery over the years is that the mother tongues have so much in them, so much that is alive, and are much more pervasive, in all strata of society, in all ages from children to the very old, men and women, literate and non-literate. What holds them together? It's not Sanskrit. It's these mother tongues. I think I went into linguistics because of that. That spoken languages had to be very, very important. It was important in my youth to have discovered this.
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We are talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled expression in economical ways. Let's not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by daemons. He doesn’t know why they chose him and he is usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
I am trembling with cold