What are the ideas which India has never forgotten ?
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The Indian experiment is still in its early stages, and its outcome may well turn out to be the most significant of them all, partly because of its sheer human scale, and partly because of its location-a bridgehead of liberty on the Asian continent. Asia is today the most economically dynamic region in the world, but it is also one where huge numbers of people remain politically subjugated. Its leaders have confidently asserted that the idea and practice of democracy is somehow inappropriate and intrusive to the more sober cultural manners of their people. The example of India is perhaps the most pointed challenge to these arguments.
India’s own past as well as the contingencies of its post-partition unity prepared it poorly for democracy. Huge, impoverished, with a culturally diverse and largely illiterate population, and inheritor of a hierarchical order designed to resist the idea of political equality, independent India had little reason to suppose that it could function as a democracy. Yet India continues to have parliaments and courts of law, political parties and a free press, and elections for which hundreds of millions of voters turn out, as a result of which governments fall and are formed. The modern idea of democracy has taken deep root in this old and sophisticated civilisation.
For all its magnificent antiquity and historical depth, contemporary India is a creation of the modern world. The fundamental agencies and ideas of modernity-European colonial expansion, the state, nationalism, democracy, economic development-have all shaped it. The possibility that India could be united into a single political community was the wager of India’s modern, educated, urban elite, whose intellectual horizons were extended by these modern ideas and whose sphere of action was expanded by these modern agencies. It was a wager on an idea: the idea of India. And one of the remarkable facts about the nationalist elite that brought India to independence was its capacity to entertain diverse, often competing visions of India. “One way of defining diversity for India,” the poet and critic AK Ramanujan once wrote, “is to say what the Irishman is said to have said about trousers. When asked whether trousers were singular or plural, he said, ‘Singular at the top and plural at the bottom.'” But Indian nationalism before independence was plural even at the top, a dhoti with endless folds. Its diversity was incarnated in the gallery of characters who constituted the nationalist pantheon, a pantheon whose unageing, cherub-like faces are still on display, painted with garish affection on calendars and posters or moulded into just recognisable statues and figures in tea shops across the country.