By Deepa Majumdar
This essay is dedicated to my mother, Smti Ila Majumdar, who fought alongside Mahatma Gandhi for the independence of India.
To my mind, the Indian flag is among the most beautiful in the world. The colors … green, white and saffron, so philosophically symbolic … and the wheel of virtue (law) at its center … all these soothe the eye of the modern global citizen … an eye scorched by materialism and athirst for gentleness, civility, depth. It is this flag … what it stands for … that shines, and makes India shine … not mammon, nor militaristic ventures. Purity, nascence, and renunciation … these are the virtues spelt out in the holy pattern of this flag, for the sake of which many died, winning India’s unique struggle for independence from British rule in 1947 … a struggle lofty in its ideal of non-violence. As our 64th Independence Day looms, we may want to reflect deeply on this beautiful flag.
In 1892, a young, majestic monk swam across the shark infested waters of the Palk strait, to sit upon a rocky islet at the foot of Mother India. There, as Swami Vivekananda meditated on the well being of India, he became, in his own words, “a condensed India.” Upon this rocky islet close to Kanyakumari he had a vision of America, and of a noble interchange … of gifting America, the ancient wisdom of India, and of receiving in return for India, the knowledge of science and technology. If today India has progressed so much in the arenas of science and technology, if so many Indians have come to study these fields in America, and if there are so many ashrams in America, if Vedanta is so popular in America … all this is indeed owing to Swamiji’s blessings and his meditation upon the destiny of India. Other towering luminaries, like revered Ramana Maharshi have also done japam for the welfare of India. How then can we fail in reaching our destiny?
Like the ancient theological puzzle – how did the many (creatures) come from the One (Creator) and how do the many return to the One – one must ask this question of India … How do its diverse aspects synthesize into a teleological One that unfolds towards the luminous and unique Destiny revealed by its History … quite as every other nation reaches the destiny unique to each? How does this beautiful tricolored One (saffron, white and green) shine as the many and how do the many chorus into the One? This question is all the more relevant for those of us who love India realistically, ethically, critically. Even as the past glory of the wisdom of Indian sages fills our hearts with pride and joy, even as we revel in the novelty of our outstanding ascetic norms (not puritanism), which are the only antidotes to capitalism and patriarchy, we must remain sleepless in our vigilance with respect to the present. For nothing is more dangerous than the blind patriotism that derives from ego boosting nationalism, laden with the added burden of post-colonial hang-ups. Like every other blind love, blind patriotism is frightening in its fanaticism, for it detracts from conscience and drowns in ideology. It claims the particular to be the universal, instead of carving the particular as a species of the universal. It makes us blind to the many glaring home-made problems facing India today … the great class divides, violence against women, violence against men, exploitation of child labor, the abhorrent caste system, corruption … and last, but hardly the least, the ongoing insurgencies that raise thorny questions about the meaning of the Indian Democracy.
What, after all is a democracy? Is it simply government by the people, for the people, and of the people as declared by Abraham Lincoln in his 1863 Gettysburg Address … is it simply the teleological actualization of a democratic constitution … is it defined merely by free and fair elections … or is it more? I think it is much more. Democracy in my mind is fundamentally related to altruism and love. If as Aristotle pointed out, friendship and justice are asymmetrical, with friendship the larger of the two, then democracy should range from the lower state of social justice to the higher state of friendship, which encompasses and supersedes justice. Better yet, if it reaches for friendship, then it automatically reaches justice. In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle says, “… when men are friends they have no need of justice,” yet conversely, “… when they are just they need friendship.” It is perhaps this distinction between friendship and justice that characterizes the distinction between the irregular, chaotic, even violent “third world” nations which are nonetheless ruled by cliquish adulterations of true friendship, often wrought at the expense of justice … and the formal market democracies of the west, utterly abject before the Almighty Ubiquitous Market, which forces them to be just, often at the expense of friendship. The measure-for-measure mechanized honesty and justice wrought by the Market, are often missing in “third world” nations. Equally, the bonds of friendship that make one forget the profit motive, even if cliquish, are practically impossible in the western democracies.
To my mind, the Indian Democracy should yearn towards friendship … for if it does, then it will automatically attain justice as well … gaining two virtues for the price of one, as it were. Mere justice, especially in the formal sense, need not build bonds of amity. For a mosaic like India to be glued together in a democracy, like a cacophony harmonized into a melody, one needs both friendship and justice. The kind of strategic and commercial reasoning that led to the formation of the European Union can never work for India. Immanuel Kant’s faith in the Spirit of Commerce as an impediment to war – “The spirit of commerce, which is incompatible with war, sooner or later gains the upper hand in every state. As the power of money is perhaps the most dependable of all the powers (means) included under the state power, states see themselves forced, without any moral urge, to promote honorable peace and by mediation to prevent war wherever it threatens to break out” – an article of faith said to underlie the formation of the European Union, can never work for India. In short, it is inconceivable in my mind, that the huge panoply of diversities that define India – class, caste, gender, language, ethnicity, religion, etc. – can be brought into harmony, like myriad jarring tones melded into a rhapsody – through the impetus of mere Commerce, and its chief gadget – the modern Market. Notwithstanding the power of the Invisible Hand, a greater power builds the bridges of charity … and this too India possesses in her unique History. For the oblique rays of charity derive from the vertical flow of piety. And if there is one virtue that bound India together most effectively in her long History … and still does, despite the ugly religious riots of modern India, and the venom of Hindu fundamentalists and other bigots … it is this virtue of genuine devotion. In the incorporeal Light of true devotion, religion in its divisive ideological aspects fades away, and is replaced by heartrending love for the divine. This love then spreads sideways, binding the congregation together into an indissoluble One.
Yet, given the context of modern India, we will have to go from earth to God, or from the horizontal to the vertical, or from friendship to piety … not the other way around. We will have to first recognize the divine in the human, as Swamiji taught, and then worship in the temple … This way, we will unleash the “I” such that it blossoms into the most universal and noble “we” possible. Sometimes this love for one another begins with simple courtesy and respect. Names matter. So does terminology. Thus, to start this horizontal love, which begins with respect, we should abandon clinical and rather offensive terms like “scheduled tribes and backward classes” and let people name themselves. We should also abandon the innumerable prejudices we bear towards the different linguistic groups of India, not the least of which is prejudice against Bengalis. We should also recognize that each generation is existentially separate from prior ones and from the History it inherits. Thus, even if it owes reparation for this History … for the wrong doings of prior generations … no generation is directly culpable for the History it inherits. This type of reasoning should erase all historical hatreds from our hearts, like those towards Muslims and Christians, that towards the west, that towards Bengalis in Meghalaya and elsewhere in the Northeast. And friendship alone can end the torment of Kashmir.
But since this lofty and historically appropriate amalgam of piety will never work for the average person, perhaps the more plebeian Market … not only the raucous bazaar, but even the cold Cyber Market … will serve as a mechanical vehicle of honesty and justice. Perhaps it will banish corruption. Perhaps it will deliver to our doorsteps that microscopic democracy … perhaps excessive in the west … but so lacking in the Indian social fabric … the one-to-one respect that lies at the very heart of friendship. For the Market does not tolerate the type of one-to-one tyranny so accepted in everyday life in India. Nor does it tolerate corruption. And once we have satiated the python of ancient pleasure principles, for which the west cannot be blamed in isolation, once we have sated the appetites with a glut of goods and services, perhaps only then will the consciousness of India as a whole be aroused and raised to a universal piety that recognizes no differences whatsoever. Only then will we have reached the noble universals symbolized by the beautiful Indian flag.