PRAFUL BIDWAI interviews PERRY ANDERSON
Historian Perry Anderson at the Holberg Prize Symposium, Bergen, Norway, November 25, 2008. PHOTO/Wikipedia
An outstanding Marxist scholar, historian and essayist, and editor of the New Left Review since 1962, Perry Anderson is known for a rich, incisive body of work spanning European history, the contemporary world, the Western Marxist tradition and intellectual history. The distinguished professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, now trains his lens on modern Indian history. His latest book, The Indian Ideology, just published by the Three Essays Collective, is a scathing critique of the dominant celebratory discourse of the Idea of India, or the lionising of the democratic stability, multi-cultural unity and impartial secularity of the Indian state as a miracle. His three recent essays on the subject in the London Review of Books have already generated considerable debate. In an e-mail interview with columnist and writer Praful Bidwai, Anderson discusses his book at length.
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IMAGE/Three Essays Collective
Quite a few people, though, who are critical of the Indian state’s claims to be uniquely democratic, secular and respectful of diversity were upset when your text first appeared in the London Review of Books, admittedly without the scholarly apparatus of the full version now published by the Three Essays Collective. How do you read these reactions?
My guess— it’s not more than this— is that the upset could be due to two things. The first would be that, although this or that strand in the Indian Ideology may be questioned, a systematic deconstruction of them hasn’t previously been attempted. To inter-connect these as a dominant discourse throws each of them into a sharper and more critical light. That, at any rate, would be one surmise. The second thing which may be disconcerting is really a question of tone. One of the effects of the Indian Ideology, even on many who might disclaim subscription to it, is the diffusion of a culture of euphemism, in which disagreeable realities are draped with decorous evasions or periphrases – ‘human rights abuses’ for torture or murder, ‘hostiles’ for rebels, and the rest. To any sensibility accustomed to this kind of verbal emulsion, calling a spade a spade is bound to be jarring.
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You’ve explained that one of the reasons why, instead of writing simply about contemporary India, you start by looking at the struggle for independence, was your shock at the reception of Kathryn Tidrick’s work on Gandhi, so thoroughly blanketed by silence that most Indians are unaware of its existence. Tidrick concentrates on the relationship between Gandhi’s self-perception as a world-saviour— his religious beliefs— and his politics. She doesn’t really explore his role as a mass leader and tactician of the independence struggle. How far is your own account of Gandhi, which many in India would regard as a savage criticism, based on hers?
Tidrick’s biography of Gandhi is an extraordinarily careful, calm and courageous work. Not just I, but any serious student of this historical figure, would have more to learn about his outlook from her work than from any other extant study of him —the vast majority of Gandhiana being, to one degree or another, hagiographic. The silence covering it in India is an intellectual scandal which reflects poorly on local opinion. The problem here is not, of course, confined to her work. More recently, the reception of Joseph Lelyveld’s much more superficial and not very political, but extremely respectful, book about Gandhi—it’s even entitled Great Soul—tells the same story. Because it dismantles some of the legends Gandhi propagated about his time in South Africa, we have his grandson complaining that it ‘belittles’ him. It’s only in this climate of deference that my treatment of Gandhi could be regarded as sacrilege. Actually, I single out not only his remarkable gifts as a leader, and his achievement in making Congress a mass party, but also his personal sincerity and selflessness—he did not want power for himself, as most politicians do. In his own way he was a great man.
But that does not exempt him from criticism. He was gripped by a set of regressive personal fixations and phobias, had a very limited intellectual formation, was impervious to rational argument, and entirely unaware of the damage he was doing to the national movement by suffusing it with Hindu pietism as he reconceived it. He is to be respected, with all his blindness. But there is no need to sentimentalize him. The complete latitude he gave himself to declare as truth whatever he happened to say at any time, and then change it from one day to the next, still as the word of God shining through him, set a disastrous example for his followers and admirers. Nowhere more so than in his inconsistencies on satyagraha itself. For when it suited him, he was perfectly willing to contemplate violence —not only to send Indian peasants to their death on the Somme in the service of their colonial masters, or applaud Indian bombers taking off to conquer Kashmir, but calmly to envisage communal slaughter—‘civil war’— in the subcontinent as preferable to expelling the British. As a historian, one has to take cool stock of all this, not skate over it as Gandhi’s apologists continually do.
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You absolve the British or the Muslim League from any responsibility in the disaster?
Certainly not. Mountbatten’s conduct in ramming through Partition at break-neck speed, at the behest of Nehru and Patel, while washing British hands of the unimaginably bloody consequences, has many claims to be the most contemptible single act in the annals of the Empire, replete as it was with so many others. After 1945 British policy towards India was actuated by concern for imperial amour-propre and fancies of strategic advantage, and little more. As for the Muslim League, Jinnah miscalculated completely— accepting point-blank Partition, claiming Assam, ignoring Kashmir, abandoning the Muslims of the cow belt, and ending up with what he himself called a moth-eaten Pakistan. But there is little doubt that the principal responsibility for the catastrophe of 1947 lay in the folly and arrogance of Congress, from the late twenties onwards, in refusing to accept that it was not the only legitimate political force in the subcontinent, but in composition and outlook an overwhelmingly Hindu party, represented the community that, just because it was stronger, could afford to and needed to be generous in its dealings with the weaker Muslim community. This is not just a foreigner’s standpoint: it is the considered verdict of an Indian historian like B.B. Misra.
You suggest that the Indian state that came into being after independence has been nominally secular, but to a largely unacknowledged extent, substantively Hindu. It’s true that Indian secularism fails by the criterion you employ—the status of Muslims, and other non-Hindus. But Hinduism isn’t a confessional faith like Christianity or Islam, based on a set of scriptures. It’s more akin to a label for a compendium of different practices. Until more recently most Hindus probably lacked a subjective sense or self-perception of being Hindu. So wouldn’t it be more appropriate to describe India as an upper-caste-Hindu dominated state? That would better capture the status of low castes, whom the state brutalizes, as well of religious minorities.
Yes, Hinduism is indeed a less unified conglomerate of texts, beliefs, rituals and practices than the two big monotheistic creeds. There is always a gap between the High and Low—elite and folk— traditions in any religion, and in Hinduism it is much wider than in Christianity and Islam. This doesn’t mean that Hinduism as such is therefore a figment of the imagination, or—in another fashionable version— a fabrication of the British. The shuffling away from any forthright acknowledgment of its presence and power in India, on the grounds that it is all too multifarious to be called such, is a defensive gesture of the kind the French call noyer le poisson or ‘drowning the fish’—that is, the attempt to evade or deny a phenomenon by dissolving it in some looser and wider category. Hinduism as a faith is certainly dissimilar in structure from Christianity or Islam. But any implication—standard in contemporary Indo-apologetics – that it is thereby better should be resisted. Greater heterogeneity does not necessarily mean lesser toxicality. Shorter in scriptural authority, it is longer in hierarchical cruelty. It is enough to think of the existence of sati. Nor, it should be said, are popular traditions inherently more tolerant than elite versions: there is plenty of European evidence to the contrary. Was the subcontinent historically different? Maybe, maybe not. That’s a question for specialists in comparative religion.
Politically, however, the central fact of modern times remains that it split on communal religious lines, and the Hindu share of the massacres that accompanied partition was not due to any notable influence of the RSS. They welled up from below, though not infrequently—Bihar and Hyderabad – covered from above by leaders of Congress. That said, it’s true that calibrating the precise nature and extent of the Hindu imprint on an Indian state born out of religious division is no easy task. Your formulation may well be close to the right one, though of course it would have to be unpacked in more detail. What can be said with confidence is that the imprint itself is systematically denegated in the Indian ideology.
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(Thanks to Mukul Dube)