Shedding colonial baggage

Shedding colonial baggage

BB Kumar’s book is a rich collection of materials and painstaking analysis, writes Satya Mitra Dubey

India: Caste, Culture and Traditions
Author: BB Kumar
Publisher: Yash Publications
Price: Rs 2,100

Author BB Kumar, being a teacher, an academic administrator in the field of higher education, an active researcher with training in anthropology, with his natural inclination for a textual and empirical understanding of Indian society mixed with first hand familiarity with the linguistic, socio-cultural and political problems of the tribes of the Northeast, can easily depend on his experience and study to write a book on Indian castes, culture and traditions.

According to him, “The confusion of the average Indian about our social structure, culture and tradition is enormous. The root cause is our culture and tradition illiteracy that is quite high in society, especially among our university degree holders. One reason for this is the continuance of the old colonial education in our country even after Independence.”

Kumar is of the view that social science disciplines such as anthropology, history and Indology, apart from the mindset of a large section of educated Indians, are coloured by colonial misinterpretations. This is primarily the motivating factor for writing this book. “Efforts should be made to get our social sciences and education rid of the all pervasive colonial hangover without any delay. The book, written with this perspective in mind, tries to inform about Indian social structures — varna and caste — and the various other aspects of our culture and tradition in the succeeding chapters,” Kumar says.

Al Beruni mentions only four castes and eight outcastes in Hindu society and the fact that all the four castes, as observed by him, had no hesitation in eating together, Kumar says, indicates that the caste system in its present form is a post-Turk phenomenon. The constant invasions, wars, defeats and reprisals in the medieval period generated insularity among Hindus, leading to the hardening of commensality and extreme forms of the notions of purity and pollution.

The early administrators of East India Company were primarily interested in profit through loot, expansion and consolidation of the British Empire. The well-integrated Indian society and stable village communities were portrayed in their reports, monographs and surveys as consisting of isolated, mutually-exclusive castes, tribes, communities, linguistic groups, sects, religions and mass of people geographically scattered and racially distinct.

Some of the early Western translators of Sanskrit texts into English deliberately misinterpreted the philosophical and religious concepts. By this the main purpose was to strengthen colonial rule, propagate Christianity and convert Indians. To achieve these objectives, Indian customs and traditions were degraded.

Going through these bold assertions, a natural question may arise: Has Kumar offered sustainable evidence to prove his line of argument? Yes.

The author recognises the valuable contributions made by William Jones and a host of other scholars and administrators. But at the same time, he points to the negative, distorted and motivated pictures of Indian society as presented by Abbe JA Dubois, Max Mueller, James Mill, ET Dalton, HH Risley, among others.

James Mill’s History of British India was recommended as a basic text for candidates of the Indian Civil Service. Even a pro-colonial scholar like Max Mueller calls this book “most mischievous”. According to a well-known Sanskrit scholar, Prof Wilson: “Mill, in his estimate of Hindu character, is guided by Dubois … Orme and Buchanan, Tenant and Ward, all of them neither very competent nor very unprejudiced judges. Mill, however, picks out all that is most unfavourable from their works and omits the qualifications which these writers felt bound to give to their wholesale condemnation of the Hindus.”

Brahmins, being the intellectual class in India, were especially targeted. Dubois considered them the greatest hurdle in winning “India for Christ”. The Boden Professorship of Sanskrit in the University of Oxford was established to translate Sanskrit books into English so as to enable the British to proceed in the conversion of the natives of India to the Christian religion. Macaulay, who had a design of “proselytisation through education”, proposed to pay £10,000 to Max Mueller for translating the Rig Veda in such a manner that it would destroy the belief of Hindus in the Vedic religion.

In Kumar’s assessment, in the early phases, the process of differentiation and stratification based on the varna system was positive. The varna system played significant roles in division of labour in Indian society and helped in organising occupational structure. Its contributions were pivotal in the socio-cultural integration of Indian society. The present degraded form of rigid and untouchabilty-based caste system is the product of the latter phases. In the first decades of the 20th century, such views were strongly upheld by scholars like Bhagwan Das and Anand K Coomaswami. Even Mahatma Gandhi had highlighted the positive roles of varna and caste.

The author has tried to discuss different aspects of caste in different chapters with special emphasis on its relationship with varna, professions and mobility, clan and marriage, food taboos and commensality, caste clusters, socio-religious practices, panchayats and castes and the caste-tribe continuum. There are chapters on deities and priests, the jajmani relationship and Scheduled Castes.

In the evaluation of any work, there are bound to be different opinions. This book, too, is not an exception. For its rich collection of materials and painstaking analysis, this book deserves admiration. At the same time, in this era of ideological controversies and political motivations, some others may find it tradition-oriented.

Both these stands will make this book more readable and valuable.

The writer is a senior sociologist and political analyst

the golden touch of conversionists

Missionaries are perfect nuisances and leave every place worse than they found it.
- Charles Dickens

The Predatory Monotheist State

Rajeev Srinivasan

The predatory State

Why is the life of the common man in India so often nasty, brutish and short? It is because the State is failing, or more accurately because the State is predatory. In general, I support a strong State, a necessity for nation-building. However, the Indian State is not dependable, which is why I am nervous about the Prevention of Terrorism Act, POTA: I fear that it will in fact be used not for the common man, but against him.

The Indian State is not able to, or willing to, or even interested in, protecting the interests of its citizens. The State is a dangerous entity whose primary interest is self-preservation and self-aggrandisement. This is because the State -- such as it is today -- is a vestige of imperial structures, intended to exploit the citizenry.

The rapacious State is not a universal phenomenon. There is a good reason why in the US there was little retaliation after 9/11 against Muslims by individuals: there is strong enforcement of the law, plus the populace is confident that the government will wreak vengeance. But the Indian State is not capable of wreaking vengeance on wrong-doers. It has shown its inability to contain violence perpetrated by anybody.

This has been shown time and again. The Rajiv Gandhi government failed to protect the Sikh citizens of Delhi when Congress goons went on a rampage against them. A number of governments in Srinagar and Delhi have failed to protect the Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist citizens of Jammu and Kashmir who have been murdered, raped and ethnically cleansed. The Modi government in Gujarat failed to protect Muslim citizens all over Gujarat, and Hindu citizens in Godhra.

The Indian government failed to protect Hindu Reang tribals in Tripura from being ethnically cleansed by Christian fundamentalists. The Indian government failed to prevent its soldiers being tortured to death by Pakistan and Bangladesh. Most egregiously, the combined power of several states has failed to capture notorious poacher Veerappan.

Why? It is because the State does nothing against criminals and barbarians. This is because the State itself may be criminal and barbarian.

This is the reason many people, and Hindus in particular, have lost faith in the State. They see Hindus being the victims of State indifference everywhere. Alien terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir need fear no reprisal when they eject hundreds of thousands of Hindu Pandits to a miserable fate in refugee camps in Delhi. Who cries for these refugees? See the documentary And the World Remained Silent by Ashok Pandit.

What did the State do when 35 Sikhs were massacred by terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir? What about when Hindu pilgrims going to Amarnath were killed by terrorists? What about when two Hindu priests were beheaded in Jammu and Kashmir? What about when a Hindu priest was shot dead in his temple in the Northeast? How about when 28 Hindus were massacred in a suburb of Jammu?

The Indian State did nothing. The State wrung its hands and shrugged its shoulders. Contrast this with the situation in the US. There were letter bombs; they found the Unabomber. The Oklahoma building was bombed; they executed Timothy McVeigh. The recent pipe bomber in Nevada has been caught. There is a feeling that the US State can and will punish wrongdoers. There is no escaping from the long arm of the law: even if you hide overseas, the US will extradite you and try you, ask the guests of the nation in Guantanamo Bay. Some may quibble that the US sometimes punishes innocents, which it does; but an implacable image is created --and that is a deterrent against crime.

But this is not true of the Indian State. The State, as it appears to most people, is a monstrous thing that is to be feared if you are a normal person; only politicians and criminals can get anything done by the State for them. You have no faith in the State.

Then why is everyone surprised when vigilantes take matters into their own hands?

The Indian State is such that it is because it is a continuation of the predatory imperial State. Nobody knows how the ancient Hindu/Buddhist State was before the coming of the Muslims so I won't talk about that. But it is clear that India has been governed by predatory States ever since. We have had a succession of the following:

• A predatory Muslim State whose objective was conversion and looting
  
• A predatory Christian State whose objective was grand theft and conversion
  
• A predatory Marxist/Nehruvian Stalinist State whose objective is grand larceny and self-preservation

India has had the unique and dubious distinction of having been governed by all three of the Semitic faiths. It is a wonder that India has survived.

Note that nowhere in the job descriptions of these Semitic tyrannies is there any mention of the rights of the people. Of course, much sloganeering happens in the name of the 'rights of the people', but that is all for show.

The Muslim State was clear in its objective of capturing the wealth that had accumulated in India. As I have said before, Indians collectively chose butter over guns a thousand years ago; and we then did not have the guns to protect our butter. This is the answer to those who wrote to me regarding my column Sport as metaphor asking why the money spent on a modern navy would not be better spent on alleviating poverty. The answer, folks, is that they wouldn't be poor in the first place if we had decent defense.

Several readers have questioned my characterisation of the colonial period as a 'Christian state.' I do so in analogy with the widespread use of 'Hindu/Buddhist' period, 'Muslim' period, etc. Why not then speak of the 'Christian' state? If assorted Turk, Afghan, Arab, Central Asian invaders are lumped in under 'Muslim,' why not assorted British, French, Portuguese, Dutch barbarians under 'Christian'? Besides, British imperialists were highly influenced by Christian evangelistic ideas. See the following quote from Subhash Chakravarthy, The Raj Syndrome: A Study in Imperial Perceptions Penguin India 1991, pp. 62:

'Examining the Christian forces at work in the administration of India and the mutual relations of the British Government and the Christian missions between 1600 and 1920, Arthur Mayhew, a director of public instruction in India declared: 'Often unconsciously, and sometimes with protestations to the contrary, those responsible during a century and a half for India's welfare had been concerned not only, as Kipling suggested, with the Law of the Prophet, but also the spirit of the Gospels' [all references here are to Arthur Mayhew, Christianity and the Government of India, An Examination of the Christian forces at work in the administration of India and of the Mutual Relations between the British Government and Christian Missions 1600-1920, London, undated].'

'[The author] suggested that the Simla secretariat was engaged under episcopal supervision in translating the Sermon on the Mount into official jargon. "Our policy has been moulded by men who have come gradually to see that the distinction between Christian missionary and administrators in India was one of scope and method rather than of aim or motive power." '

'Increasing readiness on the part of the Government to honour Christian obligations, educational progress and gradual enlightenment of public opinion, the author opined, transformed prophets and pioneers into men distinguished by unobtrusive and impersonal activity more anxious to gain colleagues than disciples.'

'Advancement on Christian lines had moved apace especially during the period covered by William Bentinck and Dalhousie with John Malcolm operating in the west, Thomas Munro in the south, Alexander Duff in Bengal, John Wilson in Bombay and Jonathan Duncan in Benares.. Subsequently,. Mayhew asserted. [that] Christian missions and institutions were included within the governmental infrastructure.'

There, in black and white, in the official prose of empire, is the evidence of the unholy nexus between Church and State. The officials of the British Empire in India colluded with the missionaries. It was a self-consciously Christian State.

The Christian State is infamous for how it looted five to ten trillion (yes, that is trillion, 1,000,000,000,000) dollars from India to the UK. I am certain, and the British historian William Digby ('Prosperous' British India) and the Indian historian Rajni Palme Dutt (India Today) would agree, that the Industrial Revolution would not have taken place had it not been for the 'venture capital' provided by loot from Bengal. Note the amazing coincidence: the Battle of Plassey, 1757. The spinning jenny, 1764; the water frame, 1769; the steam engine, 1785. Money chased innovations -- and the innovations appeared.

Just to give you an idea of how predatory the Christian State was, look at the great droughts and famines of the late nineteenth century. Consider what happened during famines. According to Mike Davis (Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World, Verso, 2000) there were 31 serious famines during the 200 years of the Christian State, as opposed to 17 during the previous 2000 years! And in the famines of the 1870s and 1880s, as many as 30 million Indians died. Yes, 30 million, one California, 10 per cent of the population.

And this continued into the Bengal famine of the 1940s which killed 4 million people (see the Satyajit Ray film Distant Thunder): purely artificial. There was plenty of grain, it's just that it was more profitable to ship it out so that speculators in the futures markets could make a wartime killing.

See my earlier column on Europe's hypocrisy to get an idea of British famine relief: the ration was one pound of rice per day for an able bodied male. An absolute starvation diet. At the same time, during the height of the famine, they exported record amounts of wheat and other grains from India to Britain! Millions were starving to death in India, and thousands of tons of grains were exported to Britain!

Furthermore, it is clear that before the Christian State was established in India, the British were on average poorer than Indians. Bengal, in particular, was wealthy. By destroying India's industries (in 1750, India accounted for 25 per cent of world manufacturing, compare that to the US with its 23 per cent share today), the colonialists ruined potters, weavers, smiths and other skilled artisans and made them landless laborers. Instant impoverishment: from a respected craftsman to an indigent so that white people in the 'Satanic mills' and factories of ye olde England could have a better standard of living!

This is not mere rhetoric on my part. Here is fact: at the time of the French Revolution, Asia dominated world manufacturing, and 'the largest manufacturing districts in the world were still the Yangtzi delta and Bengal, with Lingan [Canton in China] and coastal Madras not far behind,' says Mark Davis. Prasannan Parthasarathi suggests that 'there is compelling evidence that South Indian labourers had higher earnings than their British counterparts in the eighteenth century and lived lives of greater security.' Even outcaste agricultural labourers in Madras earned more in real terms than English farm laborers, he further suggests. (Rethinking Wages and Competitiveness in Eighteenth Century Britain and South India, Past and Present, February 1998).

Shares of World Manufacturing Output, 1750-1900

	1750	1800	1830	1860	1880	1900
Europe	23.1	28.0	34.1	53.6	62.0	63.0
UK	1.9	4.3	9.5	19.9	22.9	18.5
Tropics	76.8	71.2	63.3	39.2	23.3	13.4
China	32.8	33.3	29.8	19.7	12.5	6.2
India	24.5	19.7	17.6	8.6	2.8	1.7

Source: adapted from B R Tomlinson, Economics: The Periphery in Andrew Porter (ed), The Oxford History of the British Empire: the Nineteenth Century, Oxford 1990.

A very clear trend: Battle of Plassey and the rape of Bengal begin in 1757, and within a hundred years, India had been thoroughly deindustrialised. The Chinese held out a little longer, but they too succumbed eventually to British strategy: opium to enervate and enslave.

By destroying age-old irrigation systems, the imperialists also made the country vulnerable to the disruptive El Nino oscillations that make monsoons fail. For millennia, India had dealt with wayward monsoons through systems of canals and of local stocks of grains. With the railways, imperialists were able to siphon off these local stocks to be sold in grain markets abroad. Result: widespread famine.

Thank you so much, Britain, for 'giving' India a railway system (it was fully paid for through Indian taxes, and it was wonderfully convenient for British troop movements). Much like Tibetans should be 'thankful' to Han China for building a railway line to Lhasa. Says Davis: 'The newly constructed railroads, lauded as institutional safeguards against famine, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding (as well as protection from rioters). Likewise the telegraph ensured that price hikes were coordinated in a thousand towns at once, regardless of local supply trends.' Ah, the wonders of technology!

Taming the predatory State of today

Part I: The predatory State

The predatory Christian State lives on India in the bureaucracy: the 'steel frame' of the erstwhile imperial state. Do you notice how the district administrator is still called a 'Collector'? And what is he collecting? In the old days, he was the tax-collector, the monstrous one whose job was to squeeze water out of a stone. It is clear that the steel frame has rusted badly, as the bureaucrats now seem to outdo the politicians in venality. As an example, take Harsh Mander, and his simultaneously holding on to his IAS seniority while drawing a princely sum from the NGO ActionAid. Not to mention the fact that allegations of conversion activities apparently disappeared as soon as Mander became head of ActionAid. Curious coincidence, isn't it?

As for the Nehruvian-Marxist State, the examples of its viciousness are legion. You just have to walk into any government office. I mentioned in my previous column Two strikes about how Kerala government employees returned to work after losing a month's salary. The trade unions, for once, got their comeuppance. Reader Chandra wrote, perceptively, that they lost even more in untaxed, unreported bribes that they have become addicted to: classic 'rent-seeking' behaviour.

With the failure of the 2002 Southwest monsoon, attributed by some to yet another El Nino in the Southern Pacific, we will see hardship and starvation; but there will not be a famine. This would be a good time, however, for India's bureaucrats to thoroughly read the superb Mike Davis book, which compares the results of El Nino droughts over several seasons and over several continents. To give credit where it is due, the Nehruvian Stalinist State has managed without a single major famine since Independence (something the Chinese Stalinist State did not manage, by the way).

The State and its institutions have nevertheless been hijacked by self-seeking individuals and philosophies. Look at the State-run educational system: the Nehruvian Stalinists and the Marxists have successfully subverted the curriculum to alienate Indians from their patrimony and heritage. They have simultaneously failed to provide universal mass literacy. The only successful schools are the for-profit private schools: nobody queues up or pulls strings or gives donations to admit their child to a government school. And the Macaulayite curriculum still teaches children to despise everything Indian: perfect for imperialists, but today? What a contrast with China's curriculum that teaches raging jingoism and contempt for outsiders! No wonder Indians grow up into anti-national 'secular' 'progressives' and Chinese into hyper-nationalists.

I had to laugh when I heard Comrade Sitaram Yechuri declaim at a conference that more and more schools need to be brought under the public sector, as if they hadn't screwed up enough already. He is right from his selfish perspective though: that is the only way more children can be brainwashed into Marxist drones. See my previous column on historicide and an item in The Telegraph of August 2: a 1992 examination paper in West Bengal in which students were required to write an essay on one the following topics (thanks to reader Ravi):

• National unity and integrity are false political slogans
  
• In Hindustan, there is no place for Hindu and Hindi
  
• Five-year plans are a sham
  
• Statistics on national development are a fraud
  
• Democracy is a conspiracy
  
• National revolution is the only way for progress
  
• National means of broadcasting are useless.

Personally, I would choose 'Five-year plans are a sham.' In 'Statistics on national development are a fraud,' they must be talking about their fatherland's accomplishments in this area: see my previous column, India vs China: Startling Economic Facts.

In another question, students could write an essay on: 'Red Flag in Red Fort, that is the demand of Hindustan.' I must be confused -- I thought the Marxists supported the Islamist desire for the Green Flag over the Red Fort.

Alternatively, the students could write a précis of the following paragraph:

'The guardian of national, politics. Delhi, is a heartless administrative seat, on which sit not elected representatives of people, but anti-social poisonous snakes coming out of the caste jungle. Progress has been destroyed by tradition, education by the English medium, religion by political secularism, human beings by greed, idealism by dirty consumerism. Litterateurs have turned alcoholic, democratic representatives and administrators have become national villains, who only like secret accounts in foreign banks.'

As usual, the Marxists show that their only allegiance is to their own worldwide brotherhood. An illusory brotherhood, it has disappeared; alas, it is only in West Bengal and Kerala, and nowhere else in the world, that such dinosaurs still strut about taking themselves seriously! But they have managed to do plenty of damage already.

Look at the electricity boards, at the (erstwhile) telecom monopoly, the public airlines. Not one of them offers you the services that you as John or Jane Doe deserve. They insult you, humiliate you, act as though it were a great favour that they serve you, whereas they are paid to serve you. I find especially instructive the 'volume penalty' imposed by the phone company: that is, if you make more calls, you must pay more per call. In most systems, there are 'volume discounts,' that is, good customers get to pay less per call, but not here! This is another example of an interfering, failing State.

What is the solution? I honestly don't know. I present this analysis so that at least we are aware of the problem.

For one, I think the Indian Administrative Service needs to be revamped. I say this even though I know dedicated, intelligent and wonderful human beings of great integrity who are in the service. But the system has been thoroughly corrupted, because of political interference and the lure of money. I look at the Singaporean model: there the civil service is incorruptible because they are paid extremely well and because they are not under the thumb of the political class. Is this possible is India? Clearly there has to be administrative reform.

Another possibility is performance related appraisals in the vast bureaucracy, in addition to the proposals of the Fifth Pay Commission. The commission asked the government to reduce its strength by 30 per cent, if I am not mistaken, and to increase salaries by 20 per cent. The first recommendation has been ignored, and the second implemented, naturally. The fact of the matter is that the bloated imperial bureaucracy is not needed. When government employees went on strike in Kerala, life continued as usual, nobody missed them at all. As I keep suggesting in the case of India's hapless cricketers, let us give the bureaucrats a mechanism of 'Management by Objectives:' their goals are well laid out, and if they meet them, they get incentives; else they get fired. It is important that public sector jobs are no longer sinecures for bribe-seeking.

Since much of the problem in the State arises due to politicians, there needs to be thoroughgoing reform there too: for instance, insisting on standards of moral probity and on full disclosure of assets. In other words, no criminals, and only those who have some transparency in their financials will be allowed to stand for elections. And defections will be banned altogether: if you wish to change parties you have to resign and run for elections again. And, oh by the way, the cost of the by-election will be charged to you, personally. This will work wonders for stability, and see the end of the ameba-like asexual reproduction of political parties based on somebody's idiosyncrasies, the effects of which Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress demonstrates daily.

The other, perhaps more important thing to implement, is true democracy, where all citizens are treated the same under the gaze of the law. A uniform civil code is an absolute necessity. The definition of 'minority' is meaningless in India, since everyone is a linguistic or communal minority because of the proliferation of caste based identity in India. I would be very surprised if anyone thinks of himself as a 'majority person:' for everyone owes their allegiance to their linguistic and caste peers; and in pretty much all cases, these groupings are minority groupings. I think the State has to treat everyone equally, with a few selective affirmative action benefits given to the truly deserving, instead of blanket, loophole-ridden preferences given today to 'minorities:' I do believe in reservations as they have demonstrably helped the truly downtrodden.

Finally, the government itself needs to change its attitudes: instead of being the omniscient and omnipotent Big Brother, it needs to redefine its role as an infrastructure provider, whose main role is law and order, defense and external affairs and the protection of national interests in multilateral and bilateral world for a: a shameless mercantilist State, just like all the other major powers.

Postscript

Rajiv Malhotra mentioned an astonishing forthcoming book, Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime by Veena Talwar Oldenburg. The author argues that 'these killings are neither about dowry nor reflective of an Indian culture or caste system that encourages violence against women. Rather, such killings can be traced directly to the influences of the British colonial era. In the precolonial period, dowry was an institution managed by women, for women, to enable them to establish their status and have recourse in an emergency. As a consequence of the massive economic and societal upheaval brought on by British rule, womens' entitlements to the precious resources obtained from land were erased and their control of the system diminished, ultimately resulting in a devaluing of their very lives.' More good things thanks to the Christian State.

Speaking of Malhotra, I would recommend his extraordinary article at sulekha.com, The Axis of Neocolonialism for the insights into how the representation of India through a new Orientalism continues to follow the trends set by the predatory imperial State.

Fortunately, the Traditional Knowledge Systems of India have not died a complete death despite the best efforts of the Christian State, which banned, among other things: Ayurveda (burned all manuscripts it could find), Kalari Payat (destroyed all kalaris it could find), smallpox vaccination (declared the application of cowpox pus 'barbaric'). See the note on Dharampal at the Infinity Foundation's mandala. Happily, there are plenty of tinkerers still around: here is a heartwarming story about India's 'barefoot inventors' and the Honey Bee database at the Good News India site.

Rajeev Srinivasan