TEACHING INDIA AND INDIA'S TEACHING

By Anand Mohan
Professir of Interdisciplinary Studies
Queens College of CUNY

In this day and age in America, when the public discourse, both popular and academic, is replete with references to ethnic diversity, religious pluralism, and multiculturalism, it might seem superfluous to stress the significance of the teaching and study of Indian civilization, especially now that immigrants from the Indian subcontinent are in our midst, even though in minuscule numbers. Yet the saliency of such a study becomes self-evident when we seize the historical fact that Indian civilization has been, at bottom, a self-conscious attempt over a long stretch of time to come to terms with precisely such refractory realities as ethnic diversity, religious pluralism, and multiculturalism.

The lesson to be learned from a study of these two civilizations, the Indian and the American, is that while each embodies a world view fundamentally different from that of the other, and both have tempted to accommodate these realities, neither has been able to transcend them.

When British imperialists were at pains to repudiate the very existence of India and dismissed it as a mere geographical expression, they were not entirely wrong. The self-understanding of the ancient Indians was not that they constituted a country or a State but rather a civilization; and when the modernized Indians of the nineteenth century proclaimed that they were a "nation," they could not conceal how very much more English than Indian they were in their thinking.

It is this reception of the alien concept of nationality into the Indian political consciousness that resulted not only in the partitioning of the subcontinent between India and Pakistan but also the subsequent breakaway of the two halves of Pakistan, and the creation of Bangladesh. Nationalism thrives on exclusiveness and the perception of the other as the antagonist. The genius of Indian civilization consisted in its spirit of inclusiveness and its perception of the other as simply a different protagonist.

What held Indian civilization together was not the notion of nationality but the idea of community. This consciousness of community was produced not by any single abstract element, but by a multiplicity of concrete factors such as language, tradition, territoriality, religion, occupation and culture, each of which was a discrete unifying principle. It was inevitable that the individual was therefore concurrently a member of several different communities, and his loyalties were multiple, concentric, and expanding.

Membership in these several communities entailed obligations, which were deduced from the overarching conception of dharma. Dharma was seen as the principle which sustained and regulated the universe both at the microcosmic and macrocosmic levels. Dharma governed the conduct of individuals in their lives' progression; it ensured the well-being of society; and it produced universal harmony. However, dharma was not a set of rigid rules or a collection of categorical commandments. Protean in character and content, it permitted a wide latitude in the formulation and interpretation of obligations.

Dharmic obligations varied with time and place, context and situation. They accorded with one's station in life and with one's status in society. They governed one's conduct in war and peace, in prosperity and adversity. It is this mutability of dharma which has invited the charge from some Western commentators that the Indian lacks any sense of firm ethical variability and commitment. It was also the basis for the lamentation of John Foster Dulles that India's foreign policy of nonalignment between capitalist democracy and Communist dictatorship was fundamentally immoral.

From the Indian's monistic perspective, however, there is one entity alone of which one could speak in absolutist terms -- and that is the Absolute itself, the unmanifest One. In the manifested world of duality and plurality, within time and space, everything can only be, by definition, relative. To demand an uncompromising adherence to absolutist standards and measures in the relativistic realm of politics and morals, the Indian counters, is imprudent. Compromise and concession are the life-blood of politics.

Indeed, the Indian extends this argument to a consideration of religious beliefs also. Although there can be many doctrines about Truth, there can be no such thing as the one and only true doctrine. Just as all the rivers wend their way to the same ocean, so too do all religious paths lead to the one ultimate Reality. It is this stance which, emphasizing the uniqueness of spiritual experience, as opposed to conformity with religious dogma, that has led the Indian to insist upon the primacy of tolerance as a supreme value. It is also this very conviction which prompts the Indian to eschew all literal and fundamentalist interpretations of scripture. When Western journalists frequently write about Hindu "fundamentalism," one should read "Hindu militant nationalism" which, as pointed out earlier, is an idea imported from the West and is alien to the authentic Indian tradition.

If the foregoing passages leave one with the impression that everything Western is necessarily antithetical to all that is Indian, it would be grievously wrong. India's contact with the region to the west of her -- Persia, Greece, and Rome, and later on with Europe, through the Arab middlemen, was constant and continuous, until the European oceanic penetration of India in the 16th century. European rationalism and empiricism, the spirit of inquiry and the scientific temper found ready acceptance in India, because the achievements of ancient Indian civilization in mathematics and astronomy, physics and chemistry, medicine and metallurgy depended on approaches and methodologies not dissimilar from those of modern science.

Western political ideas and institutions, the organization of the polity along federal lines, the rule of law and the principles and procedures of the judicial system and, above all, the English language and English educational institutions, not to say anything about the ballot box, the cricket bat, the authorized version of the Holy Bible, and the joint stock company, were enthusiastically received by the elites, and have become an integral part of the Hindu way of thinking. So much so that as early as 1911, the Hindu liberal leader, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, could assert confidently that in India the West had entered into the very bone and marrow of the East. It would be quite true to say that today, of all the non-Western societies of the world, none is more Western in spirit than India is.

The younger generation in America today would find the study of India at this particular juncture quite rewarding because of the transitional stage through which India is passing, and the revolutionary transformations occurring in her society. Although India, unlike China and Japan, never closed her doors to outside influences at any time in her history, she managed to maintain intact the uniqueness of her social institutions and her cultural heritage through the preservation of the autonomy of her village republics.

Today, as the saying goes, we live in the global village. The winds of change encircle the globe, and India cannot remain immune to the pomp, the circumstance and the catastrophe of world history. Although India always possessed a history of tradition, she did not develop a tradition of history or evolve a philosophy of history. She must now reflect, more than ever before, on the meaning and purpose of the history which is shaping her, and which, in turn, she has an opportunity to influence. India today is a vast laboratory of political experiment, economic innovation, scientific progress, and social change. Since the repercussions of this engaging phenomenon cannot be contained within the confines of the Indian subcontinent, they can be ignored only at great peril to those who wish to deal with her but do not seek to understand her.