One of the great gaps in my knowledge is the history of India. I know very little about it. I have made considerable study of Russian history and Chinese history (more Russian history than is good for one). Like most Americans (at least in the old days) I studied English history as American history and like other St. Louisans of my vintage I have a smattering of ignorance of French history.
But not Indian history. You can’t know everything about everything and that’s a subject I’ve largely avoided.
My understanding is that the very idea of India as a unified whole is a British colonial one, that Gandhi largely embraced the British colonial ideal in that regard, and that the Gandhian dream of a multi-confessional India was dealt a serious blow with the creation of the Dominion of Pakistan after World War II.
All of that is what came to mind when I read this article in The Hindu:
It is in this context that we need to place the quiet revolution in higher education that has taken place over the past two decades. Today, in most non-technical institutions of higher learning women equal or exceed male students in numbers. After the 93rd constitutional amendment extended reservations, the caste (and class) composition of elite universities has been transformed. While Muslims remain under-represented, most others have gained access, making our universities the only public spaces in contemporary India where almost all groups (barring the poorest) can meet and mingle in a relatively egalitarian setting. This newly democratised site is proving to be a massive source of anxiety and resentment for the current regime. Campuses like those of the University of Hyderabad or Jawaharlal Nehru University are seen as particularly dangerous because they are spaces where Dalits are not only assertive but are making common cause with other marginalised groups including Muslims.
Hence the vicious campaign against radical students and campuses, and the relentless repetition of the charge of being “anti-nationalâ€. The bitter irony here is that while the accused have been describing the India — and, as with Rohith Vemula, the world — that they stand for in passionate detail, the accusers have offered only the thinnest and emptiest of descriptions. Nothing illustrates this better than the bizarre proposal to hoist gigantic national flags in universities. Even more telling is the plan to showcase tanks and artillery on campuses in the hope that they will exude patriotism and provide immunity against the dreaded disease of critical thinking.
That makes me wonder just how stable India is, anyway? Like many countries including the United States the Internet is changing the very nature of social cohesion in India and I suspect that is most true among the educated people there.
What I’m speculating about is the possibility that not only might India unravel along caste and religious lines but along geographic, cultural, and educational ones as well. It’s a very complicated country, with hundreds of languages, ethnic groups, and sects. De Gaulle’s wisecrack about the difficulty in governing any country with 150 different kinds of cheese must be true in spades in India.
Here is probably the best general one volume history of India written in English.
It avoids the usual PC nonsense.
(BTW, it absurd to think that anything that happens in India universities reflect much of anything other than the PC nonsense of Leftist Academics, and this of course includes feminism.)
1. I believe the original generation of Indian leaders that governed after partition were English-educated elites, and the subsequent generations have been governed from less obviously desirable ways from Western eyes.
2. The religious accommodation largely made within Hindu nationalism was to recognize a broad national identity that encompasses a variety of “religious” identities rooted in the land of the sub-continent, whether they be Jains, Sikhs, Budhists, Hindus, etc. This identity, however, leaves out Muslims, an Arab religion, and thus a perpetual source of conflict.
3. The “threat’ that untouchables will convert to Islam is not new. At least according to Michael Cook’s latest book on comparative religion, the institutions of electoral democracy severely constrain participants in politics from arguing for caste since they don’t have the numbers. Conservatives who do so are generally not of political importance.
The issue of being “rooted” in the Indian subcontinent is a sticky one. Yes, Sikhism originated in India. But Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism have much longer histories in India—just as Islam does.
To clarify, the larger religious identity is one attributed to one faction of Indian society, the Hindu nationalist parties. A lot of other secular parties are probably indifferent to this conception. Cook’s reason for focusing on this group was to compare and contrast various religious groups with Islamists. In India, this is the group that would most likely draw contrasts and foment divisions with other religions, but they bought into the idea of a unified India and the necessities of mass political movements that preclude them from calling on ancient Hindu law that is not popular. Christians, Jews, Muslims and Zorastrians are outside this concept of Hindu identity (Hindutva), but AFAIK the conflict with Islam is the only real focus. And some nationalists argue that Hindu is not a religion, but a culture, and one can be Muslim and part of a Hindu culture.