Excavating India’s Political Foundations

WHILE WATCHING Daniel Day-Lewis’ riveting performance as Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s biopic Lincoln, many viewers were struck by how effectively the film captures the complexity of debates surrounding the meanings of words like “freedom” and “equality,” terms that are the staple of political contestation in liberal democracies. National constitutions, which delineate the parameters for the functioning of political systems, use words and phrases with connotations and are subject to multiple interpretations and readings. Reflecting on all that must have transpired in those turbulent years of the American Civil War and it’s aftermath in which slavery was outlawed, one cannot but marvel at the complicated ways in which powerful ideas like “freedom,” “equality,” and “justice” acquired the connotations they did, and went on to shape the lives of countless Americans by redrawing the map of race relations. One also realises how distinctly American—in the sense of being a product of the very specific circumstances that shaped the American experience— the connotation of these ideas really was in the 1860s. This begs a question: If the American experience is described as a story about “liberty”, what were the foundational ideas that gave shape to India’s “Indian-ness”? At the level of ideas, is there any concept that has come to capture the story of the making of modern India? Of an India understood as an imagined community (to use Benedict Anderson’s evocative phrase) making sense of itself as it traversed the journey from colonial subjugation, to political independence, and one that now nurtures hopes of global ascendency? There are many answers to these questions, this is only to be expected. Ananya Vajpeyi, in a new book entitled Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India, approaches this issue in a refreshing way. She constructs an analysis around a term that served as rallying cry in the days of Indian nationalism and continues to excite the Indian imagination, the idea of swaraj (self rule). This term, which can mean both “rule by the self” and “rule over the self”, has always lent itself to a variety of interpretations. Acknowledging that the issue of the raj in swaraj referred to the pursuit of political independence from colonial rule, and therefore the goal of political sovereignty, Vajpeyi chooses instead to focus on the swa (i.e., the “self”) part of the term. Then she asks: What were the different ways in which intellectuals, opposed to colonialism in the early 20th century, imagined conceptions of the Indian “self,” of the swa- in swaraj. In pursuit of the answer, she constructs an analysis in which she assigns concepts that provide the framework for these individuals’ construction of the Indian self. For MK Gandhi, it is ahimsa (non-violence), for BR Ambedkar it is dukha (suffering), for Rabindranath Tagore viraha (longing), for Abanindranath Tagore samvega (aesthetic shock), and for Jawaharlal Nehru both dharma (aspiration) and artha (purpose). Since each of these individuals needed to evolve a conceptual platform from where to launch an intellectual critique of colonialism and western modernity, these categories could not, by design, be derived from European ways of thought or western texts, but need to have their moorings in the diverse Indic traditions that populate the Indian landscape. This was the realistic way in which leaders could respond to the predicament they faced, i.e., of articulating a sense of Indian sovereignty that was not derived from the conceptual vocabulary of western modernity. This quest forced them “to swim out into the wide deep waters of the traditions that had once been their own.” (p. xvii) Thus, the “search for the self—the self whose political sovereignty had to be reinstated—took the form of an attempt to recover a line of moral inquiry from a welter of Indian traditions.” (p. xxi). The choices of these five individuals reveal the distinct ways in which the founders of modern Indian political discourses chose to set limits on what constitutes their India, indeed the connotation they accorded to the Indian “self”. It is noteworthy that the preambles of both the Indian and American Constitutions begin with the phrase “we the people”, in acknowledgement of the democratic principle that “the people” are the sovereign power that sustain their respective polities. What Vajpeyi’s analysis does so admirably is to deepen our grasp of how the category of the Indian self, which serves as the basis for what is Indian about “the people,” came to be imagined by the makers of modern India. Just as American connotations of terms like “freedom” and “equality” are deeply embedded in the American history of slavery, empire, and capitalism, Vajpeyi’s analysis provides us with an approach for grasping the conceptual vocabulary shaped by India’s history of colonialism and nationalism. In many ways, Vajpeyi furthers the analysis of Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India by explaining how, despite the ascendency of Nehruvian conceptions of nationalism and socialism in the early years of the Indian republic, other imaginings have continued to serve as the protagonists of India’s epic journey. It is tempting to ask whether the righteousness that the early nationbuilders imagined for the Indian republic is, in fact, reflected in contemporary ground realities. Most would answer this question in the negative, since the country is clearly struggling to resolve a variety of social and institutional pathologies. The ongoing debates about corruption and the position of women in India, punctuate this mood all too well. As does that fact the Indian state is in war with many of this own people in large swathes of the central Indian tribal heartland over issues of land acquisition, cultural autonomy for adivasis, and the management of natural resources. Clearly, the aspirations for the Indian republic as articulated by the five iconic figures analysed by Vajpeyi are far from being realised. For this reason, it is provocative to place Ananya Vajpeyi’s intellectual history of the idea of India characterised as a Righteous Republic alongside Arundhati Roy’s characterisation of contemporary India as a Broken Republic, the title of her last book. While both books are different in their objectives, style, and content, their conclusions only serve to remind us of how contentiously the different Indian selves—from the Adivasi, Dalit, rural selves on the one hand, to the globalising, liberalising, nationalist selves on the other—continue to shape the destiny of the Indian republic.