(Book Review - The Hindu Feb 07, 2006)
Growing closer apart
JYOTIRMAYA SHARMA
Essays debating the issues of syncretism and pluralism in the sub-continent today to objectively reassess their importance in coping with the political and cultural future
LIVING TOGETHER SEPARATELY — Cultural India in History and Politics: Edited by Mushirul Hasan and Asim Roy; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, 1, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 750.
`Livingng together separately' is an evocative phrase to describe what is popularly known as India's `composite culture'. It serves as a convenient way of describing the manner in which diversity of cultures and voices have been assimilated and synthesised in Indian society. Mushirul Hasan and Asim Roy have put together a rich volume of essays to restate, what they perceive as India's historical propensity towards living with complexity and plurality.
At the same time, contemporary political questions are at the very heart of this volume. Hindutva today, and earlier, separatist Muslim nationalism leading up to the Partition in 1947, have severely challenged those who have argued for India's seamless tradition, from the ancient period to the present day, of syncretism and synthesis. It is suggested that a host of forces, including Orientalism, contributed to a steady chipping away of this way of life, where people had evolved ways of coping with differences.
Syncretism in history
The glue that binds this volume together is, however, the entire contemporary debate around secularism and the challenge that Hindutva poses to the survival of the notion of a secular democracy. Proving that syncretism has had a firm basis in history and is not merely a secular nationalist fantasy is the purpose of many essays in the book.
A melancholic longing for the steady attenuation of plural values in Indian society also runs through the book.
The claims of the `composite culture' argument do, indeed, seem a bit overstated, especially in the attempt to delineate a historical evolutionary schema of syncretism from ancient times to this day. But this imbalance is amply rectified by the inclusion of Gurpreet Mahajan's excellent essay, `Reinventing Democratic Citizenship in a Plural Society', where she attempts to place the question of cultural pluralism within the discourse of rights and entitlements in a modern, liberal, democratic state and society.
Tradition of pluralism
Many instances at the elite and popular levels of syncretism can be given to prove that the existence of current intolerances is merely a temporary aberration from a norm. While the general strain of the volume rejects the `constructs' of Orientalism in furthering exclusive and essentialist meanings of various traditions, it retains, more or less, the idea of an entity called Hinduism.
It further seems to suggest that had the misguided or ignorant Orientalists not been around, and a certain nationalist politics not played itself out, we would have had a continuous, unbroken, and dominant tradition of syncretism surviving the occasional blip of intolerance.
The introduction by Asim Roy approvingly quotes Javeed Alam's contention that "Hinduism had displayed an amazing capacity to tolerate diverse forms of competing world outlooks and philosophies," while also emphasising Alam's qualifications about the limits of this tolerance.
Questions to be addressed
Elsewhere, Amartya Sen too has argued in a similar vein about the existence of a substantial tradition, largely Hindu, of argument and pluralism. These arguments are important political interventions against Hindu nationalism and attempts by the Sangh Parivar to paint a monochromatic view of Indian history as exclusively Hindu. These arguments raise many questions that need to be answered. While instances of living together, whether it be the paradigm of Ajmer or the example of a cow-saving Muslim saint (both significant pieces in this volume), are admirable in themselves, they betray a certain self-consciousness about what ought to be the norm rather than the exception. What must have been ways of living together are now part of an argument that privileges and politicises something organic and effortless. If living together separately was not the norm even before the `evil' Orientalists and communalists vitiated an otherwise idyllic situation, then tougher questions must follow.
Secular discourse can no longer afford to argue that Hindutva is a deviation or a perversion of Hinduism. Rather than positing Hinduism as a tolerant, peace-loving, all-embracing, otherworldly entity, derailed from its `original' ethos only in the last two centuries, the time is now ripe to ask if Hinduism has a politics. If it does, then, this politics cannot be seen as a bolt from the blue, nor can it be reduced to constructing a rogue's gallery that conveniently shifts the onus of its present misfortunes on a set of impersonal forces and characters.
The truth, however unfortunate, is that Hindutva today represents the dominant face of Hinduism, as it exists today. It is this admission that would help us contend with the end of any serious theological debate within the entity called Hinduism on the one hand, and seriously question the content of what entails, historically and contemporaneously, tolerance within Hinduism.
At every step, this process would reveal uncomfortable facts and formulations. Civilisations, argued Nirmal Varma, are a mixture of the pure and the tainted. If this were true, then the story is one of not living together separately, but moving closer and closer apart.