Anyone reading the headlines in the morning newspaper can be forgiven for believing that Indians have lost their capacity for reasonable thought. A few days ago, we read that audiences of a Bollywood film, Chaava, went into strong hysterics at the sight of the actor, the dishy Akshay Khanna, playing Aurangzeb. Then we read that ten mosques in Uttar Pradesh’s Sambhal have been covered in plastic and canvas sheets because they happen to fall in the way of a planned Holi procession.
The implications are obvious, processions rapidly turn into mobs, and mobs run amuck destroying everything that offends their rather ‘delicate’ sensibilities. These days anything can offend, a piece of meat, a particular sort of beard, women’s clothing, magnificent structures that were constructed in times of the Mughals, and of course mosques. Indians have become, in the words of Gandhi, ‘drain inspectors’ looking for a Shivling under any Islamic structure. They see a mosque and they pick up a spade and proceed to dig. Astonishing.
The eminent literary critic Raymond Williams had reportedly remarked that he never read the morning newspaper. It spoils my day, he had said. I think most of us should follow his example because to read of senseless actions: an individual pouring milk over the film hoarding of Chhaava, a woman crying and beating her breast over the torture of Sambhaji Maharaj by Aurangzeb in a crude Bollywood film, a man slashing the screen in a cinema when Aurangzeb appears on the scene, leads to despair. Aurangzeb for the right-wingers personifies evil, even though he had employed a number of Hindu officials in his court, and even though he donated lavishly to temples. Scholars of classical music tell us that he encouraged the development of Hindustani classical music in his court, but he did not listen to music as part of his personal piety.
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At a time when China is making giant strides towards becoming a super-power, when India is poised for economic decline, and when democratic and human development indicators are rapidly falling, Indians are embroiled in these petty wars over religion and a history that goes back 300 years. This is extremely convenient for the ruling class because no one has the time to question unemployment and the dismal state of education in our country. They are too busy lamenting over manufactured historical wrongs. But what of us Indians? Have we lost the capacity to even think? Looks like it.
Think of the importance of thinking without necessarily going into the merits or demerits of Descartes’ famous aphorism ‘I think therefore I am’. Let us recollect Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that grants the right to freedom of thought, belief and worship. The right to freedom of thought is, arguably, of enormous import. Thinking about or thinking through a personal or a political predicament: a movie we watched, a piece of music we listened to, a book we read, a conversation we had, our emotional experiences, or just about the minutiae of everyday life sparks off chains of critical reflection.
No matter how muddled our mind may be when we begin to think and make sense of the world we live in, reflection through the prism of our critical impulses allows us to make our world comprehensible. We make moral judgements based on informed reflection and critiques of the way we live and the way we could live.
The world of thought is integral to understanding how the ‘real’ or the ‘represented’ world works, and what our position in this world is, or should be. If we find the existing world wanting, we should be able to say with Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”. Critical awareness can escalate and culminate in dissent. It is not surprising that authoritarian governments are wary of thinkers.
For thinking is a profoundly subversive act. It can destabilise divine wisdom, the laws of nature and rigid social norms. The process can discipline unruly personal emotions, as well as subvert political authority. There is, therefore, nothing power elites dread more than a thinking being. That is why they seek to submerge the act of thinking by overblown political rhetoric, drama, festivals, circuses, advertising blitzkriegs, public relations, appeal to some authentic tradition as if there was such a tradition in history, seductive ideologies and censorship codes. For as Julius Caesar remarks in Shakespeare’ immortal play bearing the same name: ‘Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.”
The context of thinking
The focus on thinking by no means presumes an alienated, isolated, lonely personality who thinks independently of, or in abstraction from her cultural context. We think along with other members of our culture that shapes our society. However, culture as a concept is profoundly indeterminate. Williams had argued that culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. By the late 19th century in England, culture came to mean, he argued, a whole way of life, material, intellectual and spiritual.
Whatever be our interpretation of culture, our thought processes are necessarily impacted by systems of beliefs, traditions, customs and languages. Cultural influences can range from religion, aesthetics, architecture, cuisine, dress codes, to what we eat, how we eat and with whom we eat. Jawaharlal Nehru tellingly wrote that “[t]he day-to-day religion of the orthodox Hindu is more concerned with what to eat, and what not to eat, who to eat with and from whom to keep away, than with spiritual values. The rules and regulations of the kitchen dominate his social life. The Moslem is fortunately free from these inhibitions, but he has his own narrow codes and ceremonials, a routine which he rigorously follows, forgetting the lessons of brotherhood his religion taught him.”
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The debate on culture is lengthy and a complicated one and needs an independent argument. For now, it may be enough to suggest that as we think, reflect and interpret our world before we make choices about what we want to say, or how we want to act, we draw upon systems of meanings and evaluations that come from somewhere. Let us call this ‘somewhere’ our culture or way of life. Cultures provide us with meaning systems or, to use a more evocative term, a language that helps us make sense of the world and appraise phenomenon as valuable or valueless, worthwhile or worthless, moral, immoral or amoral.
A picture of an individual making choices out of thin air is simply not persuasive because they will have no way of knowing what is valuable and what is not. It is our language (as culture) that attaches value to things, identities and beliefs, tells us how to behave towards those we consider our own and not our own, and thus enlighten us. We draw upon a language when we think out what is noble or base, honourable or dishonourable, generous or parsimonious. In sum, we think in and through language, and language is culture because it embodies and articulates meaning systems. It allows us to understand, interpret and to change our world and ourselves. Language personifies and represents an entire way of life and thought specific to a society.
We have to raise a question at precisely this moment. The moment we accept that the context of our act of thinking is culture, we have to ask whose culture? We are constituted by different streams of culture that merged together in history. We can hardly think coherently in the context of a cultural world whose meaning systems we draw upon, unless we know that in our world cultures have interacted and meshed together to create a world that is far richer than a monolithic world of upper-caste Hinduism imposed by the Hindu right.
As we walk through the gardens of many religions and their cultures in India-Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Islam and Christianity, as we become conscious that our cultural contexts are sculpted by the language and poetry of the Buddha, Ghalib, Iqbal, and Sahir Ludhianvi as well as Guru Gobind Singh, the magnificent prose of Munshi Premchand, and the genius of M.F Hussain. As we learn our values from the tolerance of Hinduism, the egalitarianism of Islam and Sikhism, the compassion of Christianity, the sublime philosophy of Buddhism and the non-violence of Jainism, our thinking and our language acquires depth and profundity. We, more importantly, attain freedom from the weight of one tradition that bears heavily upon the present, and upon our choices, our aspirations and our decisions.
Consider the advantages of living and breathing a plural culture. The moment we recognize what our shared traditions have contributed to ourselves and our society, we do not need a fixed identity marker, or a hook we desperately cling to for security. We do not look for an unbreakable anchor that connects us to land because we tremble in fear at the stormy waters of the sea. We delight in our freedom to choose our own anchor or none; we do not need milestones that tie us to one destination.
We are intellectually free because we can transcend bonds that are not of our choice as the Sufi saint Bulleh Shah (Saiyyad Abdul Shah Qadri 1680-1757) did. His Sufi composition reads: “Bulle ki Jana Main Kaun…Na mein bhed mazhab do paya/Na mein Aadam hawwa jaya/Na Koi apna naam dharaya. (Bulle I know not who I am, I have not fathomed the mystery of religion/ I am not born to Adam and Eve/ I have no fixed name.)”
Alternatively, we can think of ourselves as constituted by many streams of cultures. The modern Urdu poet Hussain Haidry writes: “Mere ek nahi sau chehre hain/Sau rang ke hai kirdar mere/Sau kalam se likhi kahaani hoon/ Mein jitna Musalman hu bhai/Mein utna Hindustani hoon. (I do not have one but a hundred faces, my roles are multi-hued, my story has been written with a hundred pens. To the extent I am a Muslim, I am also an Indian.)” Our identities are flexible provided we do not harness them to an ‘Indian/Hindu’ culture and refuse to recognise that this culture itself is the product of the surges of many cultures.
In a touching story, M. Mohiuddi, in the volume edited by Rasheeduddin Khan on composite culture, recounts that the great painter M.F. Hussain was one of two honoured guests to the prestigious Sao Paulo exhibition. One whole section of the gallery was devoted to his illustrations of the great epic Mahabharata. When asked whether he was not a Muslim, he replied, “Yes, but I am an Indian and my roots are deeper and older than Islam”. This sensibility is part of our shared legacy, for which an evocative Hindi phrase is sanjhi virasat. This is the context of our thinking and action.
When politicians or even distinguished scholars speak of ‘Indian culture’ as if it was one mass of tradition, preferably Hindu, they sideline the recognition that Indians inhabit many worlds that intersect to create shared traditions or sanjhi virasat. We have a rich cultural heritage that forms the context for the art of thinking and living. Recognition and appreciation of this should free us from the clutches of one tradition. Once we do this, we attain intellectual liberation from one vocabulary, one set of images and one set of memories.
Freedom rests in the ability to inhabit many worlds that come together in what we call Indian culture – neither wholly Hindu, nor completely Muslim, neither only Sikh, nor just Christian, neither entirely Parsi nor totally Buddhist – but all of them together. The result is a wonderful and colourful medley of philosophies that coalesce around a cluster of themes-peace, harmony and tolerance.
It is this freedom to make and remake our culture by re-igniting the tradition of our sanjhi virasat, particularly in the Indo-Islamic context, that will allow us to truly exercise freedom of thought processes. Imagine the many options we have at our fingertips then. Visualise how the acceptance of a multi-religious society enhances our being and our intellectual traditions. Let our imaginations soar beyond the horizons of an upper-caste Sanskritic, Brahmanical meaning system privileged by savants and appropriated by the right wing. Our lives will be rendered much richer.
