CHAPTER 5

ADIVASI (ĀDIVĀSĪ)

Virginius Xaxa

Several terms are used to denote groups and communities that have been described as ‘tribes’ in India. The most common among them are adimjati, vanyajati, janjati, anusuchit janjati, vanvasi and adivasi. In Hindi, adimjati meaning ‘primitive community’ is applied to tribes. This word encapsulates notions of savageness and primitiveness conventionally associated with tribes. Voluntary associations Gandhian social workers formed to uplift tribal people from their economic and social conditions were often prefixed with the word adimjati. Thakkar Bappa, a well-known Gandhian, started an organization with branches in different parts of India named Adim Jati Sevak Sangh nearly nine months after Gandhi’s assassination. Another term in use, vanyajati, had a limited circulation. The tribes have also been described as janjati. Ray has equated jana with an egalitarian form of social organization as against jati (caste) with a hierarchical system of social organization. Other scholars, such as Beteille, have contested this view, pointing out that any attempt to identify jana with the present-day tribals today is not without difficulty. In fact, ‘anusuchit janjati’ meaning scheduled tribes is routine administrative parlance in dealing with tribes.

For a little over two decades, the new term ‘vanvasi’, meaning ‘inhabitants of the forest’, has been in wide circulation to refer to people described as tribes. This term originated in the deliberations, discourses and writings of the ideologues of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). All its affiliates, such as Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal, Sewa Bharti, Ekal Vidyalaya and Vivekananda Kendra refer to tribes as vanvasis. In fact, the key organizations run by the RSS among tribal communities – Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram – goes by this name.

The terms above are, ironically, outside the lexicon of tribal communities. Some of them do use janjati and anusuchit janjati as part of administrative practice, even though these words remain outside their consciousness as tribal people. What does exist as a part of conceptual vocabulary is the category of Adivasi.

‘Adivasi’ (adi meaning ‘original’ and vasi meaning ‘inhabitant’) is an equivalent of the term ‘indigenous people’ used worldwide and has been current among tribal people in India, especially in Eastern, Central, Western and Southern India. However, such usage is markedly absent in Northern and even in Northeast India where nearly 12 per cent of India’s tribal population live. In Northeast India, the term adivasi is applied to communities that were brought in as indentured labour by colonial British tea companies to work in tea estates they opened in Assam from the middle of the nineteenth century. The Adivasi tag was acquired by these groups in the places of their origin. Adivasi is used in the region as a convenient label, shorn of the notion of indigeneity evoked by the term. This is not to say that tribal communities in Northeast India do not identify themselves as indigenous. They do and many organizations representing them have been participating in international events concerned with indigenous peoples.

The idea underlying Adivasi or indigenous peoples did not have its origin in tribals/Adivasis themselves. It originated with British administrator-scholars, ethnographers and, more importantly, Christian missionaries, Sengupta notes. Other terms in vogue among British administrator-scholars and missionaries were autochthonous, aborigines, etc., which literally meant original inhabitants. With this, the idea of these peoples belonging to a different racial, linguistic and cultural stock emerged. While the administrator-scholars and ethnographers described them as such, Christian missionaries made them aware of it. This divide sharpened with increasing interaction between tribals and non-tribals, which was far from symbiotic and harmonious. Marked by exploitation and domination, this situation was instrumental in shaping the new consciousness of indigenous peoples.

Since then this idea has become an important marker of self-identity. Even non-tribals today identify and address them as Adivasis. In fact, the idea of Adivasi has edged out the idea of primitiveness attached to the other categories. Such awareness and identity did not take shape in Northeast India as tribes there were isolated from Indian civilizational centres and therefore escaped its grip even as tribes in mainland India had begun to experience colonization before the advent of British rule. The British hastened and intensified the process that was already at work.

On the eve of Independence, the tribes were marked by economic and social backwardness on the one hand and on the other with rampant alienation of land from tribes to non-tribes coupled with the denial of rights over forest and other resources that they had enjoyed for centuries. The former entailed the idea of primitive and the latter of the original inhabitants, the Adivasis. The nationalist leadership, however, viewed Adivasis primarily from the lens of adimjati and hence considered their problems of social and economic backwardness as one arising from isolation. The exploitation was acknowledged, but this remained dormant. The integration of tribes with the so-called mainstream became the buzzword and the making of state agenda in post-Independence India. The special provisions enshrined in the Constitution for tribes must be seen in this light.

The Constitution provides for three distinct kinds of provisions for the Adivasis. These may be referred to as reservation, development and protection. Reservation is provided for under Part III (fundamental rights), development under Part IV (directive principles) and protection under Part X (scheduled and tribal areas) of the Indian Constitution. To reinforce the provisions made in the Constitutions, legislations have been enacted from time to time both by the central and state governments. The acts were concerned broadly with such issues as restriction on alienation and restoration of tribal land, money lending, governance, forest rights, atrocities and so on. Administrative steps were also taken for the implementation of reservation as were the policies and programmes for their economic and social development.

Despite these measures, Adivasis remain the most marginalized community of India today. The number of Adivasis living in poverty is high, the level of literacy is low and health indicators are poor. There has been a phenomenal increase in the number of landless and people with diminishing land areas. The alienation of land from tribes to non-tribes on the one hand and on the other by the displacement of tribes by state-driven projects, such as industries, mining, dams, power, roads, railways and wildlife sanctuaries, were the causes. It is estimated that as many as 21.3 million people were displaced by various development projects in India between 1951 and 1990. Of the total displaced, 8.54 million have been enumerated as tribals. Tribals constitute more than 40 per cent of the internally displaced population, though they are only about 8 per cent of the total population. However, benefits of these development projects did not accrue to the tribal people. All these suggest that the protection that the Constitution and law provides for the Adivasi has been sacrificed for the larger cause of national development and development for population groups other than the tribes.

References

Beteille, A. ‘The Concept of Tribe with Special Reference to India’. European Journal of Sociology 27, no. 2 (1986): 297–318.

Planning Commission . Report of the Steering Committee on Empowering the Scheduled Tribes for the Tenth Five Year Plan (2002–07). New Delhi: Government of India, 2001.

AMBEDKARITE

V. Geetha

Fundamentally, an Ambedkarite is one whose understanding of society is shaped by Dr B. R. Ambedkar’s views and arguments on the Indian social order, polity and economy. An Ambedkarite is also one who espouses ‘Ambedkarism’, a world view that brings into a unified perspective Dr Ambedkar’s ideas on a range of subjects – justice, the state, revolution and ethics – as these unfolded in the course of his life’s work and writings.

Keywords associated with Ambedkarism and which an Ambedkarite would hold important include equality, fraternity, democracy, justice, rule of law, oppressed minority, adequate representation, communal electorates, Dalits and political power, constitutional morality, republic, graded inequality, untouchability, annihilation of caste, non-violent social revolution, cause of labour, socialism, conversion out of Hinduism, Buddha, dhamma and maitri.

These terms could be assembled together in diverse ways, and an Ambedkarite’s distinctive politics would then depend on the relative importance afforded to this or that term and to the relationship that is established between all these terms. What might unite plural positions is an avowed commitment to the annihilation of caste. In this sense, one might legitimately speak of an ‘Ambedkarite’ inhabiting a variety of political spaces and being part of different political movements. It is thus possible to be an Ambedkarite and yet be part of a communist party, as the career of the late R. P. More of Maharashtra illustrates; it is equally possible that an Ambedkarite is supportive of regional and ethnic politics, especially when it comes to negotiating Indian federalism, and examples of such Ambedkarites are not wanting in a state like Tamil Nadu. On the other hand, an Ambedkarite might choose to identify with parties that are explicitly committed to Ambedkarism, such as the Republican Party of India and the groups that emerged from it.

Beyond indicating a political identity, being an Ambedkarite marks a certain social disposition: standing in for ways of being and acting that nurture and foster equality and justice in practical ways. Thus, an Ambedkarite might be one who undertakes educational work in specific neighbourhoods, helping children and young people from Dalit communities gain access to schools and colleges; or she or he could be one who mediates state welfare, by providing information and advice on how Dalits might make use of this or that state provision, earmarked for their economic and social progress. Ambedkarites are also at the forefront of struggles that protest day-to-day violations of Dalit dignity and the right to equality; they are likely to be and have been part of campaigns to end inhuman cultural practices imposed on Dalits by dominant castes. In parts of the country, an Ambedkarite could also be a neo-Buddhist, who might not be politically active but is engaged in organizing dhamma meetings or Buddhist cultural events in and through a local vihara (educational centre). In the most expansive sense of the term, an Ambedkarite is one who invites people to be part of a new fraternal universe, where mutual human interaction is welcome and necessary for the greater common good.

In political debates, the term ‘Ambedkarite’ has proved contentious. For instance, in both popular and critical left understanding of Dr Ambedkar’s life and work, and Dalit movements, an Ambedkarite is viewed as a ‘liberal’, looking to state measures to achieve a modicum of social and economic justice; a ‘legalist’ who does not wish to go beyond what is allowed by the terms of law and the Constitution; and as one who prefers to engage with social rather than economic contradictions and who, therefore, does not view class contradictions as primary. From the Ambedkarite point of view, the philosophy she or he adheres to is committed to ending one of the oldest forms of social injustice, which, in essence, also contains economic injustice and which requires one to vigorously criticize, oppose and opt out of the Hindu faith and on that account work towards the annihilation of the caste order. This position is deemed no less revolutionary than the one that seeks to wage revolution against Capital and a society based on class divisions and economic exploitation.

Ambedkarism sits fruitfully with other distinctive philosophies of social justice and equality. Thus, in Maharashtra, one might often encounter individuals and groups committed to Phule-Ambedkarite thought or to what might be called Phule-Ambedkarite-Marxism. There is also BAMCEF (Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation) which is active across the country and has consistently put forth a social and cultural philosophy which combines various anti-caste traditions and world views, including those that have to with countercultural figures who have challenged what they define as Brahminical ideals and practices. BAMCEF endorses Ambedkarism as salient to its concerns and has drawn on Ambedkar’s arguments to do with Dalits accessing political power to explain and justify the politics of the party that it supports – the Bahujan Samaj Party. In Southern India, Ambedkarism is often aligned to E. V. Ramasamy Periyar’s movement and his views on social change, and this relationship has been both fraught and productive.

Ambedkarite feminists or feminist Ambedkarites are a vocal group of people whose complex politics addresses gender realities as these shape the caste order and as they unfold within intimate and familial spaces. The new feminism that pervades the writings of Ambedkarite women places caste oppression, as Dalit and lower-caste women experience it, in the course of their labouring and social lives at the centre of its understanding of patriarchy.

In the twenty-first century, especially in the course of its second decade, Ambedkar Students Associations have emerged in different parts of the country, with a new generation of Ambedkarites redefining and reinterpreting meanings of ideals inherited from the past and from a variety of anti-caste sources. Such associations have attracted not only Dalit students but also young people from diverse social communities.

Since Dr Ambedkar’s death in 1956, Ambedkarites have grown in number and a rich, layered and complex literature continues to be produced by those who debate his legacy. The growth of social media and the internet facilitates communication across languages and borders, enabling interesting and significant conversations between those committed to ending the injustice that is caste and those working on issues to do with race or ethnic exploitation. Thus, Ambedkarism has well and truly taken its place alongside other universal philosophies of emancipation – and Ambedkarites, like revolutionaries, belong to a large global community of actors against race, caste and other forms of xenophobia.

References

Omvedt, Gail. Dalits and the Democratic Revolution. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1997.

Pai, Sudha. Dalit Assertion and the Unfinished Democratic Revolution: The Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2002.

AMIR GHARIB (AMI‒R/GHARI‒B)

S. Imtiaz Hasnain and Masood Ali Beg

In casual conversation, the literal meaning associated with both amir and gharib can be understood in most generalized sense as either ‘having something’ or ‘not having something’. Their denotative capacity further allows them to be used in a wide range of contexts, linguistically, communicatively and situationally. Interestingly, in the South Asian context both amir and gharib dichotomy always allude to antagonistic classes purely in terms of rich–poor. This dichotomy represents an inversely designated cultural and intellectual heritage, which euphemistically identifies cultural poverty with the rich and invests opulence of culture with the poor. For example, expressions like gharib brahman or gharib munshi (the literate elite) or gharib maulawi are reflective of such nuances which are completely glossed over when viewed from the perspective of straight-jacketed, Euro-centric economic parameters alone. Mera tariq amiri nahi, taqiri hai; khudi na bech gharibi mein naam paida kar, is a relevant verse by Iqbal in this instance, which means: ‘the way of the hermit, not fortune, is mine; sell not your soul! In a beggar’s rags, shine.’ As separate and distinct words, ‘amir’ and ‘gharib’ have other meanings.

Amir is from the Arabic amara, which means ‘to command’. In this sense, amir along with sardɑr refers to leader, military commander, ruler, prince, a nobleman, chief or a head. It brings richness in literature by providing a range of synonyms such as rais or syed, all bringing the sense of honour and respect to a referent to which they get attached, for instance, raisul waqt (the richest, at a given point), saiyadul shohdɑ (the noblest of martyrs) and saiyadul bashar (the noblest of humans).

When used to form a compound of the type noun + noun, it undergoes a morphological process of clipping to form mir (head, the chief). For instance, mir-e-mahfil, mir-e-kɑrwɑn (leader of the caravan mission). Here both mir-e-kɑrwɑn and amir-e-kɑrwɑn are in free variation. This process of compound formation is fairly productive and the likely explanation for amir to change to mir comes from poetics. It is the requirement of metre that generates a couplet like khudɑ khud mir-i-majlis bud andar-ul makɑn Khusro (‘Khusro! God itself leads an assembly in [inside] a celestial place’).

As mentioned at the outset, as an adjective, amir in the sense of ‘rich’ or ‘wealthy’ or ‘affluent’ is frequently used in the Hindi and Urdu speech context, such as in amir ɑdmi and amir log. But these seemingly innocuous constructions are laced with sarcasm in the discourse of economically deprived sections of society. For instance, it is quite common to hear expressions like amir log hamɑri fikr kyon kare? (‘Why should the rich care for us?’) or ‘voh ab amir ɑdmi ho gayɑ hai’ (‘He has now become a rich man’), said more with a tinge of sarcasm coupled with abhorrence. Its use in opposition to gharib is also fairly common: karti hai jo gharib ko ham pahlue amir (‘What brings a poor together with the rich’). The following couplet by Iqbal also shows, in a restricted sense, the use of amir (represented as shaikh) in the sense of an exploitative capitalist and a merciless feudal lord: aye Shaikh, amiron ko masjid se nikalwɑ de (‘O Lord! Please get the rich thrown out of the mosque [as they have not paid money to the poor]’).

Today, the term amir does not evoke honour or respect. While in the Arab context, it is perceived in the sense of a chief or head (head of the state or a vice chancellor of university is called Amir), in the South Asian context, amir was rarely in use in the sense of leader. On the contrary, in this sense the term qɑid was more in use, for example, qɑid-e-ɑzam (with reference to M. A. Jinnah) or more recently with reference to the late prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee (‘mere qɑid Atalji nahi rahe’, ‘My leader Atalji is no more’).

Gharib, in Perso-Arabic tradition, literally means ‘strange, uncommon, outlandish, foreign, extraordinary, poor, needy, humble, gentle and docile’. It is very commonly used as part of Arab names, particularly in the context of foreigners. In terms of philology, both gharib and its plural gharɑib mean ‘rare’, ‘unfamiliar’ and consequently ‘obscure’ (nɑdir/munfarid). With this meaning, its use as the title of several books is very common.

The Arabic word gharb means ‘west’. The term ‘west’ semantically can be extended to mean something which is not the ‘east’ and, therefore, ‘foreign’. Hence, in the non-technical, laudatory sense of ‘unfamiliar’ (sometimes even ‘original’), gharib also occurs in works on literary theory, where it is appropriated to evoke the notion of nativity (and, thereby, purity) in language use. The attitude of condemnation towards the use of gharib or unfamiliar was further extended to include in its ambit both prose and oratory.

There is yet another connotation of the term gharib, namely poverty. Its use in the sense of ‘poor’ or ‘needy’ is not inherent in Arabic usage. However, in Hindi and Urdu speech context this notion is very common, for example, gharib log, gharib ɑdmi. This meaning may be connected to Sufism, which is etymologically derived from the Arabic word suf (wool). The woollen garments of early ascetics were often identified with ‘the importance of manifesting spiritual poverty through material poverty’ through the use of poor rough clothing. It is in this sense of poverty that relates the Sūfī to the Arabic term faqir (mendicant) or its Persian equivalent darvish (wanderer), who is regarded as poor on account of hardship borne during his travels.

In the sense of ‘journey’ or ‘traveller’, ghurbat (derived from gharib) is commonly used. In Urdu poetry, there are many instances showing the use of ghurbat in the sense of ‘journey’ or ‘traveller’.

To conclude, the sense of affluence (amir) and poverty (gharib) is quite pervasive in the political discourse in India and is invariably a strong constituent of election slogans. It has thus been completely incorporated as an integral part of political oratory. The passive acquiescence of and demonstrable resilience to the sudden, knee-jerk proclamation caused by demonetization by a strong section of society could, in fact, come about because of the delusion that it is amir, the Other, who is now the immediate victim. Amir, as an exploiter responsible for making of the ‘Self’, gharib emboldens the perceived sense of assurance that the grief has finally struck the ‘Other’.

References

Bonebakker, S. A. ‘Gharīb’. In The Encyclopaedia of Islam , edited by B. Lewis , C. H. Pellat and J. Schacht , Assisted by J. Burton-Page, C. Dumont and V. L. Menageas, vol. II. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991.

Renard, John. The A to Z of Sufism. The A to Z Guide Series, No. 44. Lanham, Toronto, Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009.

ANGANWADI (ĀṄGANAVĀḌĪ)

Sarojini Ganju Thakur

The word ām̐ganavāḍī is intrinsically linked to a universal programme of the Government of India, the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), a mother and preschool education and child care programme launched in 1975. This programme was meant to penetrate across the length and breadth of the country, including both rural and certain urban areas, through the establishment of ām̐ganavāḍī centres of the ministry or departments of women and child welfare working in close coordination with the ministry/department of health. These centres provide ‘integrated’ health, nutrition and preschool education services to children in the 0–6 years group and pregnant and lactating mothers. In recent years, their mandate has also been extended to adolescent girls. Anganwadis are based on the premise that the overall impact of individual services will be greater if they are provided in a convergent manner.

Etymologically, the word angan can be translated as ‘courtyard’, a confined space usually within a house. Then ām̐ganavāḍī would literally translate to ‘courtyard shelter’, and in the programme the public space for the programme notionally defines the accessibility, protection and familiarity of the more private space. Interestingly, while ‘angan’ is a Hindi/Urdu word, through its link with the programme the concept of ām̐ganavāḍī has come to be accepted, used and understood throughout India.

The ICDS has approximately 7,000 projects and 14,000,000 ām̐ganavāḍī centres spread over the twenty-nine states and seven Union Territories of India. The funding pattern of ICDS between the central and state governments varies from state to state. For special-category states like Himachal Pradesh, it is 90:10 but for other states it is 60:40. According to the scheme, all children up to 6 and pregnant and lactating mothers of the country are covered by this scheme. Anganwadis visibly embody the penetration of governance to every corner of the country and, in contrast to the overall top-down nature of governance, it also represents the localization of governance. Given the huge impact and coverage of this scheme in some states, development partners such as UNICEF, WFP, WB and DFID have also been involved with the implementation of certain aspects of the scheme.

The scheme is primarily welfarist, offering a package of six services, namely, supplementary nutrition (SN), preschool non-formal education, nutrition and health education, immunization,

health check-up and referral services.

SN is a very important aspect of the scheme and in fact has often overshadowed other services. SN is intended to meet the gap between the average daily intake of children and the recommended dietary allowance. It takes the form of snacks and hot meals for children belonging to the 3–6 year age group who come to the ām̐ganavāḍī and take-home rations for children under the age of 3 and pregnant and lactating mothers and includes provision of folic acid for adolescent girls and pregnant and lactating mothers to deal with iron deficiency. The actual nutrition provided varies from state to state.

The ICDS team comprises the Am̐ganavāḍī workers (AWWs), ām̐ganavāḍī helpers, supervisors, child development project officers (CDPOs) and district programme officers (DPOs). The AWW is usually a woman who belongs to the local community where the ām̐ganavāḍī is located and is considered an honourary worker. She gets an honourarium, contributed to by both the central and state governments. AWWs have often raised questions about the quantum and nature of the honourarium, given the time and responsibility attached to working in the ām̐ganavāḍī. Ām̐ganavāḍī helpers assist the AWW, generally, but are often involved in meal preparation, assistance in looking after the children and in general cleanliness of the ām̐ganavāḍī. In addition to these workers, medical officers and accredited social health activists (ASHAs) are also actively involved with the AWWs to ensure immunization and vaccination of the children, thus achieving convergence of different services.

Evaluation of the impact of the programme also varies from state to state. However, in general terms, the ām̐ganavāḍī has been responsible for spreading awareness of and ensuring immunization, monitoring the growth and weight of children, knowledge of antenatal and postnatal care, preschool education and supplementary nutrition. In recent years, there has been an effort to strengthen and restructure the ICDS through a series of programmatic and management reforms. These reforms have been aimed at certain qualitative aspects, such strengthening the early childhood care and education (ECCE) aspect and focus more significantly not only on children under 3 years of age, identification of severe and moderate malnutrition and improved monitoring of the programme but also on the provision of improved infrastructure, including construction of buildings for ām̐ganavāḍī centres in a phase-wise manner.

In fact, anganwadis embody the presence of government, and their influence and ambit extend to the implementation of most initiatives at grass-roots level. This includes the organization of self-help groups for women or the schemes for adolescent girls but are equally critical for the successful implementation of the National Rural Health Mission. In the recent past, ām̐ganavāḍī workers have been involved with the registration of children under the Ādhāra scheme and in the electoral process as well! The ām̐ganavāḍī program in India is the world’s largest for early childhood development and is a very visible aspect of the presence of Government of India even in its remotest corners.

References

Gupta, Akhil. ‘Governing Population: The Integrated Child Development Services Program in India’. States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (2001): 65–96.

Palriwala, Rajni and N. Neetha . ‘Care Arrangements and Bargains: Anganwadi and Paid Domestic Workers in India’. International Labour Review 149, no. 4 (2010): 511–527.

AYUSH (ĀYU¯S.)

Madhulika Banerjee

AYUSH, acronym for Ayurveda, yōga (and naturopathy), Unani, siddha (and sowa rigpa) and homeopathy, is the official name given to living traditions of medical knowledge, practised widely across the Indian subcontinent and now also across some parts of the globe. Yet, of them Ayurveda, yōga and siddha most clearly originated in India, while the other four were founded elsewhere and then took root here. Unani, as the name suggests, has its origin in Greece, in the tradition of Socrates, Hippocrates and Galen. It evolved in West Asia through an interesting combination of healing traditions, including those from the Indian subcontinent, at the court of the Persian rulers. When it came to the Indian subcontinent with the wandering Sufis and later rulers, it expanded its pharmacopoeia by learning from, as well as lending its knowledge to, the medical knowledge systems that were already in use here. Homeopathy was an eighteenth-century German medical knowledge system that came to India by the nineteenth and then flourished in many parts of the subcontinent. While it continues to flourish here even today, it exists on the margins in Germany and other parts of Europe. Naturopathy developed in Europe, as part of the struggle to retain the vestiges of the knowledge of the herbal medical system that was rendered obsolete by biomedicine. Sowa rigpa is a Tibetan medical tradition that is based on Buddhist literature and has its origins in the Himalayan ranges. These living traditions of medical practice existed separately, yet in close relation to each other for a very long period of time. They contain within themselves great diversity and the umbrella term under which they come together, AYUSH, is a curiously modern identity created by the contemporary postcolonial nation-state of India.

The beginnings of the AYUSH traditions, with the exception of homeopathy and naturopathy, date to about 3000 BCE to the early years of this millennium. They each have clearly worked out epistemologies in written texts, though operationalized with reference to the specific contexts in which they are rooted. At the same time, they have also continuously innovated on the basis of learning and lending with each other. This process of enrichment of these systems encountered a different path in their encounter with biomedicine, the medical knowledge that evolved in post-Enlightenment Europe. While the early encounters continued the trajectories of mutual exchange, the paradigmatic difference with biomedicine marked the predominant development of the AYUSH systems from the nineteenth century onwards.

The commonality in the epistemology of these systems is derived from their understanding of the body: in external terms, in its agro-ecological context, and in internal terms, a mélange of humours and organs in symbiotic relationships with each other. Thus, there are distinctive methods of diagnosis, prognosis and treatment regimens, the latter including procedures as well as materials. The first foundational commonality lies in their understanding of the relationship of human beings with nature. That they both belong to the same elements yields significant insights – that the harmony within the body is guided by the harmony without; so, they can never be separated from each other. This aspect has implications for their relevance in contemporary times, which will be discussed later on.

One of the most important aspects of the contemporary AYUSH is its legacy from the experience of colonialism through the gradual domination of biomedicine. Biomedicine did not come as a finished, complete medical knowledge system with the onset of colonialism but actually evolved throughout the colonial period. But its perspectives of mind–body duality, the identification of microbial causes for disease, its systems of diagnosis, prognosis and externalizing of treatment drew it as one apart and away from all the AYUSH systems. Its remarkable achievements complemented those in firepower, commerce and bureaucracy, altogether constituting a network of power that undermined the knowledge structure of not just AYUSH but also those ranging from shipbuilding to weaving to agricultural practices and irrigation systems.

A great many scholars have characterized it as an encounter in which the AYUSH systems were challenged, belittled and undermined as credible medical systems, positioned clearly as the Other of biomedicine. Many scholars have pointed to the vigorous response offered by these systems. These were through processes of mass manufacture and the advertisement-led marketing of their medicines, the creation of modern teaching and research institutions for these systems, printing of their textbooks in English and other Indian languages and adoption of the modern title of ‘Doctor’ – markers of modernization and homogenization, leading mostly to creating a Double of biomedicine. However, each tradition undertook this process in its own way, leading to a great variety of doubles available. In this too, it must be pointed out that there was a real struggle by each of the systems to retain some of the ‘glory’ and their specificity as markers.

In this process, these systems have shown remarkable resilience, developing capacities to adapt and to learn. Practitioners of these systems are able to read and analyse diagnostic tests continuously developed in the biomedical world, keep track of new research and findings published in the best journals and also know the specific properties of new molecules and formulations that continuously hit the market. No doubt this is a response in defence, in order to keep up their practice, a great majority of them having lost confidence in the systems they were trained in, opting to prescribe in the allopathic mould. There is a proportion of them, however, that do this in order to actually proffer a translation of categories across epistemological divides and a furthering of medical knowledge that only such a detailed and nuanced exchange can bring. This is an aspect of the AYUSH community that is not known to even the common allopathic medical practitioner community, which harbour biases and reservations about their counterparts much like the common public does. This is unfortunate because of a lost potential of dialogue between medical knowledge systems that could actually break through frontiers of medicine and which are instead mired in received structures of power. Much of the responsibility for this rests with the politics of the postcolonial state and its policies towards these systems.

During the anti-colonial struggle, visionary practitioners of Ayurveda and Unani had created and vigorously lobbied with nationalist forces to recognize them and give them credibility. The dominant segment of nationalists was keen on modernization in general and not interested in traditional knowledge systems. So, for AYUSH, in addition to the struggle against the colonial state, it was a struggle against the dominant nationalists as well, an aspect that was carried over to the postcolonial period. Numerous committees and reports recommended institutional and regulatory frameworks for traditional medical knowledge systems, but the bottom line remained that the bulk of the outlay of government expenditure was always on biomedicine and a very small portion on all seven of the AYUSH streams put together. Following long years of struggle by AYUSH practitioners, a Central Council for Indian Medicine and seven Central Councils for Research, one for each of the streams, were established. This caused a transformation of the locus of institutional interest in them, leading to the creation of a separate wing of the Ministry for Health and Family Welfare in 2000 (initially called ‘Indian Systems of Medicine and Homeopathy’ [ISM&H]). The NDA government that took over in 2014 created a separate ministry for AYUSH. It is important to note, however, that the financial outlay proportions between allopathy and AYUSH remain the same.

As stated earlier, one of the strong counters to the colonial regime and its espousal of biomedicine was the creation of modern, mass manufacturing units of ayurvedic and Unani medicines. Between 1885 and 1910, a whole array of companies was set up – Dabur, Hindustani Dawakhana, Baidyanath, Zandu, Kalpataru Medical Company, Sharifi Dawakhana, Arya Vaidya Sala Kottakkal, Arya Vaidya Pharmacy Coimbatore and Hamdard. Each of these is easily recognizable even today – indicating a story of ingenious adaptation and innovation undertaken by these companies to keep the AYUSH systems a force to contend with commercially. The earliest expectation from creating these companies was that consumers, who were familiar with these products culturally, would be more inclined to use them when able to access them off the shelf readily at the market, just like the pills and syrups of allopathy. Familiarity and trust were expected to be the twin foundations of the prosperity of these firms. From this point, they standardized the mass production of the ‘classical medicines’ (those spelt out in the source texts), adapting modern machinery created for other purposes to undertake the arduous processes of grinding, filtering, straining, condensation, experimenting with fuels for boiling and slow cooking and using the tableting machines of modern pharma companies to create the complex measures of pills that had been made by hand before. They adapted the capacity of traditional practitioners to create unique formulations based on those given in the classical texts, into the modern category of patent and proprietary medicines, supported by the law by an amendment to the Drugs and Cosmetics Act in 1974. For both categories, they adapted, too, their traditionally prescribed systems of quality control both to the machinery and the new perspectives, continuously having to defend their practices to modern regulatory and market imperatives. For this, they conducted simple validation experiments to complex clinical trials, having to continuously adapt the parameters they were forced to use, as received from the modern disciplines of biochemistry and the pharmaceutical industry. Further, they had to accept and respond to the market’s innovations on packaging, to keep their feet firmly in the contemporary.

By far the most important innovation that these companies have made was to position a great part of their products as fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs). The AYUSH systems are founded on the belief that food is medicine/medicine is food, and that a range of natural products within easy reach can take care of daily health requirements. This foundational idea is transformed into the FMCG sector – the category that commercial enterprises understand and consumers can relate to. The outcome is a range of everyday cosmetics and nutritional and health supplements, supported by ingenious marketing that points to the judicious mix of tradition and modernity in these products, with an appeal to the nationalist pride of the beleaguered middle class. It is important to point out, however, that not everyone necessarily followed the trajectory of classical medicines to proprietary medicines to FMCG – a company like Hamdard, for instance, began its presence in the market with RoohAfza, a sherbet that is popular to this day, before it was known for its other formulations.

It is this segment of the pharmaceutical market that realized its potential in the global wave of ‘the herbal’ in the 1990s. The search for new molecules by companies in the United States and Europe and for preventive and less harsh medicines by consumers had generated a demand for herbal medicines that they had relegated to their obsolescent past not so long ago. This had already created a niche market there and given the leadership they provided for markets worldwide, it was clear that this trend would catch on in the Global South as well. AYUSH manufacturers could see this coming and, for the first time, they were able to mount a collective and somewhat united pressure on the central government to demonstrate its commitment to creating policies that would help them both at home and in the world. The creation of the ISM&H department, the first separate policy on traditional medicine in the country, predating the one from the World Health Organization (WHO), formulating Good Manufacturing, Laboratory, Agricultural (for raw materials) and Trade practices were all initiatives aimed at preparing this sector for legitimacy and credibility in the international market. The process was not easy – they faced quick reprisals internationally by way of official committees in the UK and Europe slotting them in hierarchies that would clearly disadvantage them. In the United States, ill-informed and poorly argued academic debates in established scientific journals around the content of heavy metals in Ayurvedic medicines served to create an abiding doubt about their veracity. Those battles continue and AYUSH products still cannot be sold or dispensed as medicines – they can only be prescribed and sold as food supplements. But the practitioner-entrepreneurs, from India at least, are not about to give up. They are engaged in continuous lobbying for a change in policy, while the practitioner-researchers are engaged in working on the efficacy of these medicines in collaboration with mainstream research institutions like the National Institutes of Health in the United States.

If there is a possible exception to this trajectory from within the AYUSH, it would be that of yōga. Principally, because it was not material product-oriented body of knowledge, it was not involved in the processes of commercialization such as was Ayurveda, Unani, siddha, sowa rigpa or indeed even naturopathy. While it is known to have been around for a very long period of time, the presence and spread of yōga in precolonial and colonial India have not been systematically studied. It was known to be the niche practice of those who devoted their life to religious study, but if it ever belonged to the everyday routine of ordinary people is not exactly understood. Like all other systems, the widespread and diverse nature of yōga is evident in the existence of the many schools, the principles and practice of which may have been known to a close circuit of yogis. Its movement across nations, along with the religious ideas of Hinduism in the nineteenth century, is well known and documented.

If this account of contemporary AYUSH were to indicate that it is the state, the market and institutional debates where it is housed, nothing could be more insubstantial. In India, where so much of significance lies outside the realm of the state, the market and other institutions, AYUSH does so likewise. Community health initiatives, non-governmental organizations as well as discrete individual interventions characterize the presence of these systems all over the country. As elsewhere, contestations, negotiations, debates and innovations characterize this space and it is as lively and active as the other two. A range of initiatives are being carried out across the country, such as creating systems of legitimizing non-institutionally trained, but widely accepted as legitimate, healers, forging programmes of accountability for public health programmes, drives for setting up home herbal gardens in both rural and urban settings, creating small units for making herbal medicines under the guidance of local practitioners for local consumption at nominal rates and encouraging farmers to take up the cultivation of medicinal and aromatic plants that would fetch good prices and supplement their incomes. Of these, the setting up of home herbal gardens to make people more comfortable with using plants to heal themselves, as also the attention to local production of medicine for local use, challenges the modern health concepts of dependence on chemical-based medicines and the centralized, unsustainable form of manufacture considered necessary to make affordable medicines accessible to all. These are, in many ways, more interesting, because this is where the possibilities of collective action around health are best played out, as also the explorations of the future sustainability of AYUSH – commercially and climatically. From the WHO’s call for ‘Health for All’ in the Alma-Ata declaration of 1978, expected to be reiterated forty years hence in 2018, this is the space that has the potential to transpose the slogan to ‘health by all’.

References

Alavi, S. Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition 1600–1900. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007.

Arnold, D. Science, Technology and Medicine in India. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

BHAICHARA (BHĀ’ĪCĀRĀ)

Satish Aikant

Bhaichara (literally meaning ‘brotherhood’, from bhai, Hindi for ‘brother’) has characterized Indian society since the earliest periods of history as a significant organizing principle of social life. All tribal groups in the past had shared strong bonds of solidarity, reflected in successive social formations. Myths and rituals have played an important part in promoting solidarity among various groups. Fairs and festivals in India bring about cultural integration and play a crucial role in bringing about bhaichara among communities. Usually celebrated in the carnivalesque, open-space festivals like Holi, Deepavali and Eid constantly challenge the categories of ‘public’ and ‘private’. Interstitial outside of public spaces, such as bazaars and street corner shops, acts as the meeting point of several communities.

The antecedents of the concept of bhaichara can be found in the composite culture which came into existence with the influx into India of travellers, invaders and migrants, including first the Aryans and later the Mughals and then the British. Indeed, India is an amalgam of several religious communities. It is the spirit of bhaichara which characterizes this syncreticism. Ashoka (304–232 BCE) embraced the concept wholeheartedly after the Kalinga War. The reign of Akbar (1542–1605 CE), especially, was marked by the spirit of Hindu–Muslim synthesis and harmony, as displayed in the new religion that he founded, Din-i-Ilahi (Religion of God). However, it is the medieval bhakti poets who laid the strong tradition of bhaichara among the people by breaking down barriers of caste and religion. Kabir (1398–1448) was a great votary, as were Ravidas (1398–1540), Guru Nanak (1469–1539) and Jyotirao Phule (1827–1890). Amir Khusrau (1253–1325), a great Sūfī poet, made seminal contribution to the composite culture of North India. The teachings of these saints and poets found their fruition in what has come to be known as the Ganga-Jamuni tehzib, that is, the culture of the land between the two rivers of Ganga and Yamuna, though composite culture is not essentially restricted to North India.

The Progressive Writers’ Movement in 1930s and 1940s North India further underscored the discourse of social harmony. Premchand’s well-known stories like ‘Mandir aur Masjid’ and ‘Himsa Paramo Dharmo’ are not only literary masterpieces but also show deep impact on his mind of India’s composite culture.

In modern India, Mahatma Gandhi showed unequalled passion and commitment to communal harmony. His crusade was directed not only against the British colonial power but also at fighting social injustice and untouchability which he considered to be the foremost evil. Gandhi spread the message of Hindu–Muslim unity and worked for it. Nehru’s idealistic and secular approach to politics laid the foundation for the ethos that has prevailed in India since Independence. He carried the principle of brotherhood to the international arena. It is he who in his idealistic exuberance coined the slogan Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai (‘Indians and Chinese are brothers’), even though the relations between India and China had not always followed this normative framework.

Bhaichara has found much favour in popular culture in India, especially in Bombay cinema. The Nehruvian era was characterized by idealism and the moral vision of films such as Paigham (1959) and Dosti (1964). The 1977 blockbuster Hindi film Amar Akbar Anthony which celebrates ‘unity in diversity’, bridging religious divisions between Hindu, Christian and Muslim, can be read as a parable of secular India.

A disturbing feature of clannish solidarity which runs counter to the spirit of bhaichara is the social institution of khap panchayats in Northern India, which represent themselves as ‘custodians of honour’, claiming to be autonomous from the state to avoid legal sanctions. They are medieval remnants of regressive tribal societies that have persisted in the modern liberal age. Barring such aberrations, bhaichara as a felicitous concept continues to be the bedrock of social/communal harmony in India.

References

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2002.

Dwyer, Rachel and Christopher Pinney , eds. Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001.

CHANDRAYAAN (CANDRAYĀṆ)

Gopal N. Raj

The name ‘Chandrayaan’ has become inextricably linked with Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) programme for robotic lunar exploration. ISRO had initially suggested calling the spacecraft it proposed to send to the Moon ‘Somayaan’. But, when Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee announced India’s first voyage of cosmic exploration in his 2003 Independence Day address, he christened it ‘Chandrayaan-1’.

A Moon shot was a radical departure from ISRO’s well-defined trajectory, which produced satellites for remote sensing, communications, broadcasting and weather monitoring and place them in orbit around Earth; these activities were not glamorous but served practical needs. The eye-catching lunar mission, on the other hand, created tremendous excitement and pride within the space agency as well as among the wider Indian public. It was also noticed internationally, adding to the sense of India making its mark as a rising global power.

Although many spacecrafts had already gone to the Moon and humans had walked on it, important scientific questions about Earth’s natural satellite still remained. The Chandrayaan-1 was designed to orbit the Moon while its instruments took images and gathered data. The probe carried instruments made by ISRO’s own units as well as from abroad. A small ‘Moon Impact Probe’ that detached from the spacecraft and fell to the lunar surface – to plant the Indian flag, as it were – was included at the suggestion of former president, late A. P. J. Abdul Kalam.

Chandrayaan-1 drew on ISRO’s years of experience in building, launching and operating satellites. It was launched on 22 October 2008 and entered lunar orbit on 8 November that year. But, malfunctions that began less than three weeks after the launch (although not made public at the time) led to the mission’s premature termination after only about ten months in space.

Even so, the mission accomplished a great deal before it ended, including giving ISRO the experience to undertake more challenging efforts at space exploration. India’s subsequent, and much lauded, Mars probe launched in 2013, which the popular press named ‘Mangalyaan’ (ISRO called it simply ‘Mars Orbiter Mission’), was a direct offshoot.

More recently, in 2019, ISRO launched its second lunar mission, Chandrayaan-2. A robotic lander, carrying a small rover, crashed in the final moments of its descent to the lunar surface. However, an orbiter, equipped with eight scientific instruments, is circling the moon.

More planetary exploration is planned. Another spacecraft that will go to Mars is on the anvil and a mission to Venus is being prepared. Others will doubtless follow. Chandrayaan-1 marked the start of this chapter in ISRO’s history.

References

Current Science, Special Section: Chandrayaan-1, 96, no. 4 (2009): 486–546.

Kasturirangan, Krishnaswamy. ‘Space Science in India: Two Recent Initiatives’, Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose Memorial Lecture, delivered at The Royal Society, London, 2004.

DALIT (DALIT)

Gopal Guru

Dalit is a modern word whose origins have been traced by Romila Thapar to Pali, the language of ancient Buddhist literature. However, the term acquired political salience in the early twentieth century in the writings and speeches of Babasaheb Ambedkar. In the post-Ambedkar period, this word finds spectacular presence in the 1972 manifesto of the Dalit Panthers. Today, the word has acquired wide political currency in India, In the field of formal academic scholarship, scholars have used the word quite freely. This free use of the word does not have any bearing on the original meaning that this word was infused with in the manifesto of the Dalit Panthers. The manifesto sought to see this word as founded on the singular meaning of caste exploitation. It strongly connoted victimhood: Dalits were victims, physically and mentally ground down by caste exploitation. This is a passive definition set against the expansive meaning adopted by the Dalit Panthers. However, reading Dalit exclusively in terms of caste has acquired currency today in politics and the mass media.

The concept Dalit is no doubt sociologically constituted and historically arrived at. But it refuses to be defined in terms of victimhood and political passivity. Non-Dalits also use this word as if it is a concrete object, a pathological object. In fact, the word Dalit is politically constituted only in opposition to other contending words such as Harijans, SCs and Buddhists. In fact, the word Dalit militates against the word Harijan, which is removed from social contradiction. Harijan is a word that places itself in a position in which people are no longer responsive to understand the concrete world, which is organized around the cognitive world of differentiation, polarization and classification. Harijan takes itself out of a position of contestation and locates itself in the realm of the theological and the spiritual, both of which are fundamentally non-cognitive. Unlike such a word, Dalit participates in the political project and makes it intensely contestable.

Similarly, the word Dalit is different from ‘scheduled caste’ or ‘SC’. SC is found in the language of legal rights and acquires relevance within the logic of a policy regime. SC is part of the pacifying structure controlled by the state. The word Dalit, on the other hand, exists outside this patronizing location. It is a word of struggle; it is a word which acquires its essence through the assertion of one’s moral right to dignity. In fact, this word has come up in the context of the limits of the language of individual rights, which may guarantee a Dalit the advantage of self-esteem but not of self-respect. Self-esteem based on positional good can be developed by using the support of state institutions, but self-respect can be acquired only outside patronizing state institutions. Dalit carries a political charge and is confrontationist in orientation. In its political expression, it carries the intense power of resistance.

The word Dalit is not available to quotidian polemics. It is not a polemical word in the sense that it is suffused with unified and rigorously controllable meaning. In polemics, on the other hand, the looseness of the internal content of a word allows the polemicist to play with its different meanings. Thus, for the postmodernist polemicist, words are used only for meaning-making. Meaning with effective degree of coherence acquires its essence not from other words but from the reality which stands outside the word but ultimately becomes integral to it. The word Dalit, however, establishes it rigour through its oppositional relationship with other words. The identity of this word is not secured by definition but by a process involving a display of its power vis-à-vis the pacificatory power of Harijan, SC and even non-Ambedkarite Buddhists. The word Dalit becomes transparent through its power display. It does not hide its power. Because of its determinative force and internal coherence, it refuses to be reduced to either ‘untouchable’ or its extension ‘Mahadalit’. In other words, it is neither extendable in terms of its instrumental use by interested parties nor is it expandable in terms of its transformative meaning which is still at its core.

The ground of the meaning assigned by the upper castes to the word Dalit is constitutive of the incarcerated and stigmatized lives of millions of Dalits in India. The innocent use of the word Dalit tends to stabilize itself in the limits of its very meaning. When used with such intention, the word Dalit is pushed into a state of frozenness and is forced to encounter its semantic death. Dalit then gets reduced to an empty shell, an empty signifier. Thanks to the cast of mind that celebrates this death of a live word. Is not Dalit then a keyword to access the complexities of the casts of mind?

References

Omvedt, Gail. Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India. SAGE Publications India, 1994.

Webster, John C. B. ‘Who Is a Dalit’. Untouchable, Dalits in Modern India (1999): 11–19.

DEMOCRACY

Peter Ronald deSouza

In an opinion survey conducted in 2006, as part of a larger study on the state of democracy in South Asia, 5,205 respondents were asked an open-ended question: ‘Why is democracy understood differently by different people. According to you what is democracy?’ The question was translated in all the Indian languages. They were entitled to give two responses each. Ninety-nine different responses were received which were then grouped into the following seven clusters: (i) people’s rule, (ii) parties and elections, (iii) law and institutions, (iv) rights and freedom, (v) social justice and equality, (vi) development and welfare and (vii) peace and security. A few had a negative attitude to democracy. From the varied responses, we see that not only does democracy in India carry the whole normative burden of development, justice, rights, equality, peace and government formation, it also has, since Independence, acquired the status of a common sense in Indian politics. Democracy in India is the magic potion that will solve all ills and meet the myriad expectations of ordinary people. In the village gram sabha, local disputes are settled by a show of hands. While gantantr or prajatantr are Hindi translations of the word democracy, it is fair to say that the word democracy itself has become a keyword in all the Indian Bhasas.

The credit for this must go to the Indian Constitution. With the stroke of the pen, and not because of a long struggle, the people of India were given the gift of universal franchise. All adult Indians irrespective of gender, education, caste, community, property or status acquired the right, as Schumpeter described it, to choose who was to govern them for a fixed period. In spite of a freedom movement, and of the colonial constitutions of 1919 and 1935 where there was limited democracy, it was the adoption of the Constitution of 1950, by ‘we the people’, which installed the architecture of democracy and inaugurated the era of popular control over decision makers and of political equality. It was the inspired leadership at Independence and, it must be acknowledged, a postcolonial romance about a new nation that set India on this irreversible democratic path.

Indian democracy has all the elements of a vibrant democracy: regular elections which are free and fair; peaceful succession; a competitive party system; a fairly independent press; an articulate but fragmented elite; an autonomous judiciary; separation of powers into legislature, executive and judiciary; elected representatives at all tiers of government: national, state and local; oversight institutions such as the SCI, CAG, ECI, CVC and CBI; diverse social movements; and many non-party political formations. India also has a long culture of philosophical and political dissent from Buddhism onwards to Naxalism today. It is a plural cultural space that finds manifestation in the process of intense political contestation.

Seventy years of a working democracy have qualitatively transformed, and is transforming, the social landscape of an old society and an older civilization. Although Indian democracy has all the problems and challenges that democracies elsewhere experience, such as elite capture of institutions, arrogance of political leaders, a criminalization of politics, ethno-religious mobilization, excessive influence of money power, invisibilization of the protests of those excluded, a structure of law often inhibiting the delivery of justice and the domination of the public discourse by an elite, Indian democracy has still succeeded in converting the social landscape from a hierarchical to an aspiring egalitarian one. Democracy in India is work in progress. Any inconvenience is regretted.

When analysing Indian democracy, two questions need to be asked together: What is democracy doing to India? – the transformation question detailed earlier – and the converse, what is India doing to democracy? This latter question implies that Indian democracy offers conceptual challenges to the global discourse on democracy beginning with the normative overload which the concept carries, to the fashioning of relevant terms to describe it, such as non-party political formations instead of civil society, or dharanā, rasta roko and ghērāva, as forms of protest, or satyagraha as civil disobedience. Responding to both questions gives one a sense of the unique historical transformation that is currently underway in India, because of democracy.

References

deSouza, Peter Ronald. ‘The Indian Commonsense of Democracy’, no. 576, Seminar-India, 2007, New Delhi.

Sheth, D. L. At Home with Democracy, edited and an introduction by Peter Ronald deSouza . New Delhi: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

DISABILITY

Annie Koshi

Historically, disability has been understood as the ‘inability’ to function according to certain standards set by society. How did we come to understand a difference as an inability? To answer this question, an examination of the connotations and meanings of a few words in some of our languages, in the light of recent advances in disability studies, is germane.

In the Hindi-speaking belt, the terms seedha and seedhi are often used to address individuals who are not capable of divergent, abstract thinking, alongside terms such as bholi, bawla and bhola for individuals who are generally slow in cognition. The term budwak is used in Bihar, bhondu in western Uttar Pradesh and mandabuddhi in Kerala for individuals with mental retardation. In casual talk, these words also often lend themselves as derogatory terms for the non-disabled as well. The same is the case with other terms used for physical impairment: be it zuk-zii-skyon-ba in Bhoti or Ladhaki or loola and langda in Hindi for people having issue with mobility. In a slightly different case, the name of the blind Bhakti poet, Surdas, has come to be used to mockingly refer to persons with visual impairment. In all, it can be safely said that most words that have been used to denote disability in one form or the other have crossed over from being used to just describe people with specific disabilities and entered generic conversation for casting aspersions on others.

The dichotomies in our parlance are ‘normal’ versus ‘abnormal’, ‘abled’ versus ‘disabled’ and ‘typical’ versus ‘atypical’. All of these situate the challenged within a socio-medical framework. They have far-reaching implications on perceptions, attitudes and consequent interventions. A case in point is the word divyang (divine limbed) that has recently seen a surge. This word for disability was popularized by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his monthly programme on the state radio and TV channel, Mann ki Baat. Besides using the word divyang, he had also specifically referred to persons with visual impairment as pragyachakshu (wise-eyed). It meant to be in opposition to viklang, which strikes a direct reference to lack of ability. Despite the negative connotation that viklang carries, its usage was official. The word figured on the names of institutions and organizations that worked for the visually challenged. Following the prime minister’s directive, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment ordered an official change in terminology. The state had effectively stepped into a renaming that was actually a perspective-building.

A study of the usage and promotion of the term ‘divyang’ suggests that the term sets us back a few years in terms of disability rights. Conferring a benign status to people with disability obscures the real problems they face and is flagrantly patronizing. However, phrases such as these in truth centre perceive disability only as a ‘weakness’ to be viewed by the non-disabled as worthy only of charity. Such perspectives do not to fully entitle the disabled to equitable employment, medical care or education and therefore inclusion.

This brings us to the question: what then is disability? Is it an individual’s problem or a social construct tinged with attitudes and perceptions that construct the narrative around the word which calls for weeding out nonconformity or the atypical? Disability is a state that is imposed and recognized by society and governmentality. The pseudo-valorization of the disabled as objects of charity or medical cases distances us from a rights-based approach, where society is required to modify infrastructure and environment to accommodate the individual, rather than requiring the individual to change and adapt. In other words, when disability is seen as an abnormality and ascribed divinity, there is less emphasis on how the environment needs to be structured, rather society delineates and marginalizes the group because they are unable to adapt to existing structures.

Transcending conventional ideas of intellectual and physical impairment to include social and financial challenges, disability studies contribute to inclusion/exclusion studies as well. Such studies will help celebrate rather than rue diversity.

References

Bhattacharya, T. ‘The Language of Disability: A Linguistic Analysis’. University of Delhi, 2009.

Prime Minister’s Office. ‘Text of PM’s speech at SamajikAdhikaritaShivir for distribution of aids and assistive devices in Varanasi’. Delivered on 22 January 2016. Available at: http://www.pmindia.gov.in/en/news_updates/text-of-pms-speech-at-samajik-adhikarita-shivir-for-distribution-of-aids-and-assistive-devices-in-varanasi-22-01-2016/?comment=disable (December 2018).

DOWRY (DAHĒJ)

N. Jayaram

Dowry (dahej, in Hindi) is an institutionalized practice of giving gifts in cash or kind or both to a bridegroom or his (extended) family on behalf of the bride’s family at the time of the wedding or very soon after. It is a common marital tradition in the Indian subcontinent, dating back centuries. It ostensibly emphasizes marriage as a relationship not just between two individuals but also between two families.

Dowry is different from ‘brideprice’ or ‘bridewealth’, which is a transfer of resources from the bridegroom’s family to the bride’s family in acknowledgement of the transfer of rights over the bride’s productive and reproductive capabilities. It is a form of compensation to the bride’s family for the loss of her labour. Whereas dowry is seen as a sort of compensation to the bridegroom’s parents for taking on a ‘non-productive’ family member, as a sort of ‘pre-mortem inheritance’, in societies where daughter’s inheritance rights in parental property are assumed to be commuted into dowry given at the time of her wedding.

There is no consensus on the origins of dowry in India. Generally, there is a correlation between the bridegroom’s educational qualification and occupational standing, on the one hand, and the amount of money and the monetary value of gifts given, on the other.

Giving or receiving of dowry, especially what and how much is given or received, reflects the prestige of the families involved; it may mean upward mobility for the bride and thereby her natal family. Over the last century, many lower and middle caste groups which formerly gave brideprice or bride wealth now insist on receiving dowry. Dowry has also gained ground among non-Hindus – Christians, Muslims and tribal communities – whose religious ethos gives it no explicit approval.

Parents start saving for their daughter’s dowry from her birth, placing a heavy financial burden on families of lower socio-economic background. At the same time, the practice of dowry results in the circulation of wealth within the endogamous sub-castes, contributing to sub-caste solidarity. Given the predominantly patriarchal family system in India, dowry is also assumed to be a form of ‘bribe’ to ensure fair treatment of the bride at her in-laws’ household and insurance to cover any eventuality the bridegroom may face regarding his health or economic position.

Demanding dowry as a precondition for marriage is now regarded as extortionate and a punishable offence. The Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961 (amended in 1983) and Sections 304B and 498A[9] of the Indian Penal Code prohibit the request or demand and payment or acceptance of dowry ‘as consideration for marriage’.

Law, however, has had limited effect. The highest number of crimes committed against married women is by husbands and their family due to dowry. An average of 302 such cases, including 20 dowry deaths, are reported every day, but the conviction rate is a dismal 35 per cent. Another deleterious fallout of the practice of dowry is the psychological ill treatment meted out to brides who cannot meet the bridegroom’s or his family’s dowry demands, such as abetting her suicide. The preference for the male child and female infanticide/foeticide, resulting in a skewed sex ratio unfavourable to girls, is also attributed to the practice of dowry. The pathology of dowry, therefore, exposes the contradiction between a regressive social practice and an ineffective social legislation.

References

Basu, Srimati. Dowry and Inheritance. New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2005.

Kohli, Hari Dev and Suman Nalwa . Law Relating to Dowry, Dowry Death, Cruelty to Women and Domestic Violence. New Delhi: Universal Law Publishing Company, 2011.

GANDHIAN

Sudarsan Padmanabhan

The term ‘Gandhian’ has been inspired by the historical Gandhi. Interestingly, it is attached less to the persona of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and more to the larger than life figure of Mahatma Gandhi, known variously as the Great Soul or the apostle of peace. The term ‘Gandhian’ has been iconized in the form of Gandhi and vice versa. While the term also kept evolving with the twists and turns of Gandhi’s life, it exemplifies only some of the attributes of Gandhi’s mystique. It is also pre- and post-Gandhi, as some of the qualities that were valued were ascribed to Gandhi and some of Gandhi’s qualities began to be encapsulated in the term Gandhian. The term Gandhian has also continued to expand in scope to include phenomena according to the spatio-temporal contexts, for example, Occupy Wall Street protests in the United States against the influence of multinational corporations on politics. Thus, the term Gandhian is not reducible to Gandhi alone. In that sense, the term Gandhian represents a dynamic and continually evolving idea. As we parse what the term signifies or connotes, the legend of the term continues to grow with what could be considered an increasingly un-Gandhian epoch. The Gandhian becomes what is not un-Gandhian. Ironically, thus, the idea of a Gandhian is also enriched by its opposite. What does the term Gandhian signify?

In the contemporary epoch, the term Gandhian could be analysed from the moral-ethical, economic, political, social and environmental aspects. In the case of moral-ethical framework, the emphasis on satya (truth) and ahinsā (non-violence) is the constant refrain of a Gandhian understanding in the public imaginary. In the case of economic policy, self-sustainable, local and village-based economic development models are identified with the Gandhian economic thought. Gandhi’s disciple, J. C. Kumarappa’s The Economy of Permanence details a life in synchronization with the rhythms of nature that is organic, environmentally sustainable and harnessing the local natural and human resources judiciously so that they can regenerate, without exhausting them, satisfying the needs of the community and not the greed of the individuals to amass wealth and involving the local populace in various economic activities and financial decision-making process. E. F. Schumacher’s ‘Small Is Beautiful’ is an example of the Gandhian model of economic philosophy. When it comes to the social aspect of Gandhian thought, social evils like untouchability, gender discrimination and inter-religious strife should be forsworn. In the political realm, Gandhi espoused an ethic of duty and responsibility towards fellow human beings over a rights-based approach. He saw the rights-based approach as individual-centric and not based on a sense of love for the other. For Gandhi, rights emanated from duties and politics cannot be divorced from ethics.

While Gandhian philosophy is hailed as a precursor to deep ecology, in his voluminous and prolific writings, he did not speak much about ecology or the environment. The Chipko (tree-hugging) movement in the 1970s was led by rural women village heads of the Himalayan region to protect forests from being ravaged by unregulated lumber mafia. This movement was later made famous by the Gandhian Sunderlal Bahuguna’s 5,000-kilometre walk along the Himalayas. The concept of sarvodaya (universal upliftment), an integral part of the Gandhian oeuvre, was an inspiration to the Save the Forest movement in the Garhwal region of the Himalayas. Though there were no explicit environmental policy formulations in Gandhi’s writings, the way of life that was practised in his ashram was simple, clean, austere, hygienic and contented. Gandhi also emphasized the connection between physical labour and spiritual satisfaction. Hence, mass production and wholesale consumption were considered to be injurious to the living environment and human well-being.

The Gandhian social construction programme was designed to address five major issues plaguing India before Independence. Hence it was aimed at socio-economic measures to alleviate poverty, social reforms including Hindu–Muslim unity, women’s equality, abolition of untouchability, political empowerment of villages, building a rural economy through cooperatives, land distribution to the poor, strengthening civil administration and reducing the size of the army, environmental protection and providing quality education with emphasis on the vernacular as the medium of instruction with Hindi and English to provide a national and international dimension to the education.

References

Gandhi, M. K. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1956–94.

Weber, Thomas. Gandhi, Gandhism and the Gandhians. New Delhi: Lotus, 2006.

GAON (GĀNV)

Jitender Parsad

The term gaon, which stands for the English word ‘village’, is derived from the Sanskrit word grama. According to M. M. Williams, grama refers to an inhabited place, village and hamlet. In the Rig Veda, the term refers to the collective inhabitants of a place, community, race and any number of men associated together, such as in a multitude or troop (especially of soldiers). Opposed to the term grama is the Hindi word shaher, which derives from the Sanskrit word nagar used to refer to a town/city.

Basham notes, ‘The basic unit of Aryan society was family.’ He further observed, ‘A group of related families formed a sept or grama, a term which later regularly meant “village”, but which in the Rig Veda, usually refers to a group of kinsfolk, rather than to a settlement and the family was staunchly patrilineal and patriarchal.’ Any discussion of grama or gaon will necessarily involve studying the family and kinship structures.

The term gaon refers to a cluster of huts, small and large, often grouped round a well or some river basin that served people in organizing cultural activities. Historians have also observed that such gaons were walled or stockaded for protection from ferocious animals and invaders. The sociocultural life inside a gaon was characterized by cohesion, solidarity and strong bonds of kinship. The term gaon, therefore, invokes the feeling of communal solidarity. And, the people residing in a gaon formed a self-conscious community and often had an energetic community life. Culturally speaking, the term gaon gets associated with community, that is, a ‘primary group’ where people had face-to-face contact, physical proximity, identity of interest and strong normative orders bound by the feeling of fraternal solidarity. The so-called nuanced expression of gaon also centres on native terms like gama, desh, khera, mazra, dehat, khap, gohand, peend and dhani. These are some alternatives for gaon in certain linguistic regions. Each of these expressions carry its own meaning but they all go to suggest strong bonds of kinship that characterize their relationships.

In the writings of sociologists and social anthropologists, the term gaon is rarely used. The English term, ‘village’ is used synonymously to refer to rural society, agricultural community, peasant community and tribe. While in the mid-twentieth century, a number of sociologists emphasized the importance of the village as representing the basic structure of Indian society, there were some sociologists who pointed out the continued existence of urban society. Thus, the term, shaher as opposed to gaon, came to be used to characterize the dichotomous structure of Indian society. M. S. A. Rao, while editing a classic work on urban sociology in India, discussed rural as against urban in dichotomous terms. The first urbanization in the Indus Valley civilization is dated to c. 2500 BCE.

Before sociologists of Indian origin began discussing the Indian village as basic to understanding the sociocultural framework of Indian society, British colonial administrators considered gaon to be a revenue unit. This colonial perspective was born out of their own perception of studying Indian society with a financial motive. They also perceived the village as a monolithic and unchanging entity. The leading and founding administrator of British colonial rule in India was Charles Metcalfe, whose popular passage suggests that village communities of India might be termed as ‘Little Republics’ that enjoyed independent and autonomous character. Whatever may be the perception of Charles Metcalfe, the fact that remains undisputed is that their construction of the gaon as an idyllic and utopian political community and characterized as an autonomous enduring group was a romanticized depiction of the village. Their construct was born out of the orientalist perspective, which viewed from the point of view of a group having customs and traditions of the indigenous population. As against the oriental perspective, there existed the Anglicist’s view which treated native customs and traditions with a certain degree of contempt. Thus, treating the traditionally settled inhabitants, the village, as a revenue unit was their main concern. From the point of view of administration, at times they showed concern with the customs and traditions of the rural society, but whenever they needed to have administrative control over the village, they used law and court as legitimate institutional instrument. However, the colonial construct of treating the village as a revenue unit was criticized by the Marxist scholars like Irfan Habib, who saw the village as a ‘cohesive exploited whole’.

The colonial construct of the village also had an element of ethnocentric bias with a political agenda that treated village as a core category. However, for nationalist leaders like M. K. Gandhi, B. R. Ambedkar, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore, Rajendra Prasad and Vallabhbhai Patel, the Indian village epitomized the core civilizational ethos. Gandhi considered the village as harbouring the soul of the people and therefore insisted that if India has to develop, the village must be centre stage.

The term gaon is also viewed from the perspective of representing communities and traditions. Robert Redfield provides a useful list of four major characteristics of the ‘little community’ of a village: smallness, distinctiveness, homogeneity and self-sufficiency. For him, the little community, that is, the village, is a ‘cradle-to-grave arrangement’.

Village life was also characterized by barter transactions, and such transactions have long been integral elements of its agrarian economy. Jajmani relations (patron–client relations), that is, the landed and the dominant caste extended patronage to their clients normally in exchange of services rendered by them, were popular for a long time in the rural areas. The serving castes of low status had a jajman (patron) from high caste and the serving castes were termed as kamin (client). The nexus of relations existing between them was characterized by both patronage as well as exploitation.

The term gaon finds a place in the writings of Indologists. Iravati Karve has discussed the gestalt of three types of villages in Maharashtra. First, the nucleated village with a habitation clearly defined from the surrounding cultivated fields. The second type of villages are generally strung along length-wise on two sides of the road, without any sharp distinction between the habitation area and the cultivated area. In such villages, the land is exploited for both horticulture and agriculture. The third type of village is found in Satpura mountains, where the houses are situated in their own fields in clusters of two or three huts all belonging to a single closed kinship groups. In the last type of village, we understand that the expression gaon can also suggest corporate or a cohesive group reinforced by kindred relationships, caste groupings and family status.

However, it must be noted that a village may consist of more than one caste group. In North India, the villages are clan-based settlement. Thus, multi-clan villages may also exist. There is a tendency on the part of dominant clans to form clusters of villages known by as athgaon (group of eight), chaubisi (group of twenty-four), chaurasi (group of eighty-four), etc., where the rules of gotra (clan) govern social relationships such as marriage. Any contravention may be considered a violation of customary rules. Thus, in some cultural regions, the rules of gotra exogamy and village exogamy suggest the cultural survival of customary practices. The cultural formations of groups of such villages are called khaps. In Haryana, the clusters of neighbouring villages constitute numerous khaps and the elderly within the khap act as the custodian of the norms and traditions of the khap panchayat. These khaps may play a predominant role in social and civil matters.

References

Basham, A. L. The Wonder That Was India. Delhi: Rupa, 1982.

Chauhan, B. R. The Rural Studies: A Trend Report in a Survey of Research in Sociology and Social Anthropology, vol. 1, edited by M. N. Srinivas . Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1974.

HIJRA (HIJḌĀ)/LGBT

Ashley Tellis

Hijra, an Urdu word (Arabic root hjr), used mainly in North India, is one of several terms (e.g., aravani or tirunangai in Tamil Nadu, jogappa in Karnataka) used for a member of an indigenous community found across India and the subcontinent comprising people who identify as women and dress up as women and desire men. This category includes castrated men, hermaphrodites/eunuchs, intersexed people and biological men who are part of a very structured guru–chela (master–student) and kinship system. Syncretic in terms of religious beliefs, many in the Hijra community borrow from regional variations of mythological stories (e.g., Bahuchara Mata in North India, Goddess Yellamma in Karnataka, Lord Aravan in Tamil Nadu). Historically, they were part of the royal court and guarded the harem. Their status declined in the nineteenth century when the British deemed them a criminal tribe. They earn their living through performing certain rituals, begging and sex work.

Hijras must be distinguished from transgender, a term of US origin meant to signify several things that hijras are not. These include a desire to transition from one sex to another, a sense of fluid, non-binary identities and a range of expressions of these as variant from their assigned sex in a characteristically US and naive belief that principle of sexual difference might be simply circumvented by an act of will and a sleight of hand. Hijras are firmly located in the principle of sexual difference.

The conflation of these two categories has led to much confusion over the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill 2018, which has been hijacked by a fledgling but influential upper-caste and upper-class movement of trans people, influenced by, indeed formed in the crucible of US trans politics and demanding absurd legal definitions of gender as entirely self-nominated and endlessly proliferating, while hijras without basic rights lose the possibility of gaining these through the law.

LGB (lesbian, gay and bi) in India are also, like the T mentioned above, urban, upper class and upper-caste identities adopted by urban Indians from the Euro-US contexts of these movements that in the West fought for rights since the 1960s. Of these, only gay politics has been prominent largely via the legal demand to read down (and not repeal) Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code which, while it does not mention homosexuality, penalizes buggery and ‘acts against the order of nature’. This legal campaign asked for the decriminalization of private sexual acts between consenting same-sex adults when these were never outlawed in the first place.

While the Delhi High Court upheld the reading down of Section 377 as unconstitutional in 2009, the Supreme Court first reinstated it as perfectly constitutional and in no need of reform in 2013 and then read it down in 2018. Both sides of the argument, however, miss any real political movement for LGBT rights in India. The reason for this and for the anomalous nature of LGBT politics in India is that it came with the opening of the Indian market through the process of globalization or neoliberal economics. It came as a ready-made language and politics without any social struggles on the ground. One indication of this is the adoption by Indian LGBT politics of contemporary Western LGBT campaigns, like the one for gay marriage, given the eventual assimilation of the Western movements into the neoliberal economy without any sense of the prehistory of those movements in the West. It also came through the politics of aid and funding for HIV/AIDS, through NGOs, and NGOization must not be mistaken for a social and political movement on the ground.

While there is some sort of LGBT movement that predates contemporary LGBT politics (which in its current form is certainly not a movement) in India, this has been sporadic, intermittent, evanescent and not yet mapped as a historical narrative at all. Whether it was the AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan in Delhi, which fought for the repeal of Section 377 and worked around HIV/AIDS awareness in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the work of figures like Shyamala Nataraj and organizations like the South Indian AIDS Awareness Programme (SIAAP) since the 1980s around AIDS, sex workers and sexual minorities in Tamil Nadu, the lives and careers of individuals like Hoshang Merchant in Hyderabad and some gay men who lived courageous lives as self-identified gay men and, even in the neoliberal moment, an organization like the short-lived Campaign for Lesbian Rights (CALERI), an independent formation that came out of the Hindu Right’s attack on Deepa Mehta’s Fire in the late 1990s.

An LGBT movement in India is yet to be born and will need to craft its conception away from this neoliberal efflorescence that passes as a movement in India and the hegemonies of class, caste and global empires like the United States with their worldwide propaganda of a certain language and politics. This is a difficult proposition but a good place to start.

References

Dube, Siddharth. No One Else: A Personal Story of Outlawed Love and Sex. Delhi: Harper Collins, 2015.

Merchant, Hoshang. The Man Who Would Be Queen: Autobiographical Fictions. New Delhi: Penguin, 2011.

JANTA (JANTĀ)/PUBLIC

Rama Kant Agnihotri

Janta literally means ‘public’. It derives from the root jan, which means ‘person, fellow, people’. Janta may not be formally related to jan, but it does give the sense of ‘collection/ gathering of people’. Several other words in the Hindi–Urdu lexicon are used in the same sense, including logbaag, samaaj, samudaay and aavaam. Janta is generally used to refer to a community, collective or a group and could refer to all the people of a country. Association with a specific geographical region such as a state, a larger territory subsuming several adjoining states or the whole country/nation is a necessary feature of the concept of janta. One can perhaps not talk of the janta of the whole world, because the expression is central to the concept of a nation-state.

The word gained currency in the political discourse with the formation of the Janata Party at a moment when the democratic ethos of India was at stake. When in 1975, the Government of India declared Emergency in the name of national security, several political parties got together to constitute the Janata Party, which defeated the ruling party in the post-Emergency 1977 elections. It is therefore not surprising that many political parties have the words janta or janataa or jan in their name, for example, Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP; the party in power at the Centre now), Janata Dal, Janata Party, Rashtriya Janata Dal, Lok Janshakti, Bahujan Samaj, etc.

In several contexts, the word janta can also be treated as ‘plebeian’, ‘masses’ or ‘ordinary’, as opposed to ‘elite’. One could, for example, hear, ‘This film will do well with the aam janta’, that is, this movie will be a great success among the masses but may not appeal to the elite.

Before we conclude, a word about the alternation in the pronunciation of janta and janataa. According to the standard Hindi phonological rule, word final ‘a’ is not pronounced. For example, the inherent ‘a’ of ‘l’ of the name ‘Kamal’ is not pronounced. An extension of this rule says, if a word ends in a long syllable, the inherent ‘a’ of the preceding consonant is not pronounced. Hence, jantā. However, Sanskritized pronunciation favours maintaining the inherent ‘a’. Hence ‘kamala’ and ‘janataa’.

References

Malik, Yogendra K. and V. B. Singh . ‘Bharatiya Janata Party: An Alternative to the Congress (I)?’ Asian Survey 32, no. 4 (1992): 318–336.

Swain, Pratap Chandra. Bharatiya Janata Party: Profile and Performance. New Delhi: APH Publishing, 2001.

LOVE MARRIAGE

Rajni Palriwala

Asha told me that her son and daughter-in-law had chosen each other themselves – they had met at the company they work in. She was a Jain, whereas they were Baniyas. I exclaimed that was nice; theirs was a love marriage. Asha was quick to deny this, saying that it had been a proper arranged marriage, with all the ceremonies and events, done as grandly as they could. This brief conversation encapsulates much of the meaning, discourse and signification around the idea of love marriage in contemporary India, an idea and a possible practice for which the English words are used rather than the various languages in which it may be spoken of in the Indian context (such as prem vivah).

It is difficult to trace the etymology of what is at times a hyphenated word, as Perveez Mody notes, at times a phrase and at times a noun with an adjectival qualifier. It is the last that perhaps has the earliest resonances, with orientalists of colonial and native origin, anthropologists and traditionalists who feared the deluge of Western mores. All, in different ways, sought to distinguish cultural practices of Europe and the subcontinent. Marriage in this region, they held, was arranged by family elders on the basis of social compatibility and was not a consequence of shared romantic love between future spouses. Thus, this twinned word, ‘love marriage’, referred to an emotion and to an institutionalized relationship, both taken as being universal with equal emphasis on both parts. It was in their conjunction that a specificity and a distinction that were signs of modern conjugality as manifested in the European ideal were being claimed.

‘Love marriage’, as an idea, has since been studied by a range of scholars across the humanities and social sciences, where two themes have been to point to a long history of romantic love and the variety of marital practices and marital emotions across time and social groups in the subcontinent, as Francesca Orsini observes. Yet, as has also been emphasized, connotations, meanings and practices of love marriage suggest a phenomenon different from earlier constructions of romantic love or conjugal love or conjugal-erotic love or conjugality. What continues in social narratives is the idea of romantic love as possibly transgressive, tragic and doomed, especially when it precedes marriage and the careful social and community orchestration of choice. The shadow of the socially illicit hangs over much of love marriage, even as political ideologies validated the idea and modern law enabled the legalization of the socially illicit, though not absolutely and without question in practice (Mody 2008). Across diverse streams within the movement for national Independence, including some social reformers, Gandhian socialists, the left and modernists, love marriage was rightfully transgressive, as it would enable inter-caste marriage, dowryless marriage and a simple wedding, which formed a route to break caste divisions, ‘wasteful’ practices and democratize marital and familial relations. These have been themes in modernist literature and a central motif in popular cinema. At the same time, inter-caste marriages and simple weddings were not synonymous with the idea of marriages following romantic love and passion, as such marriages were also initiated and arranged by friends or parents of such ideological and political inclination.

It is striking that in much of the articulations, love marriage was and is seen in terms of its defined opposite – the arranged marriage. Starting from very different vantage points – those who wish to uphold ‘Indian’ tradition and those who question the division between the free individuals of the modern West and the absence of individual agency and emotion in the tradition-bound Orient – this dichotomy has been questioned. For the first, the argument is that in arranged marriage, both sexual and companionate love comes after the wedding and will persist and make for happier and lasting marriages as the social and cultural compatibility of spouses and a wider network of relationships have been ensured. The second stream of critique highlights the social determinations of ‘free choice’ and cultural and class isogamy in the shaping of love and marriage selection in the West (Khandelwal, 2009) and questions the distinction between emotion and rationality in personal choices. This also suggests a third and empirical blurring of the dichotomy in contemporary times through uncovering the continuum between the two opposites: from marriage arranged by family elders using old and new modes to find a match and with greater or lesser right to refuse the match on the part of the young (clearly only possible as age of marriage has risen), matches initiated by friends and comrades and even family elders in which individual emotional compatibility and desire is given more space and perhaps time to develop before the decision to marry and certainly before the wedding itself, self-arranged marriages in which elements other than the emotion of individual romantic or sex love is primary, to love marriage which is consequent on romantic and erotic love and a desire for a shared life together, whatever the difficulties it may entail. Common across the continuum is the idea of compulsory heteronormative marriage.

In contemporary India, the conjoining of love and marriage carries different meanings and social implications for people of different classes, ages, cultural milieus and life trajectories. There has been an upsurge of studies of ‘love marriage’ couples and their families, in different generations, while media and popular cultural forms carry a constant conversation on love marriage, in which an influential, but not singular, diaspora is also a participant (Uberoi 2006). For the cosmopolitan, urban, middle-class youth, it is a sign of their distinction, their individual autonomy, modernity and necessary to the life they desire; for their parents, it may also be a claim to modernity or inescapable if their ‘modern’ children so choose as long as the choice meets community (caste/religion) and class criteria or a way out in a context of difficulties in arranging a ‘proper’ match, given rising dowry and increasing intra-community differentiations; the last may also be the case for poor working-class parents whose daughters find a spouse at work or elsewhere; for others – both urban and rural – it is a threat to the family, as it signals that their children no longer accept their authority, that their daughters-in-law are way too forward and will not ‘adjust’ and that conjugal love will displace the filial love on which a cared-for old age depends. For them, love marriage is an invitation to social chaos and loss, as for many young men, who are struggling to find their place in the economy and in their communities and for whom love marriage reduces the pool of possible matches from which their parents can select. For many young women, love marriage also reduces the possibilities of post-marital natal support, as it may result in rupture of kin and community ties and the impossibility of speaking of problems in a self-chosen marriage, unlike in arranged marriages where parents have continuing expectations of and responsibilities for their married children.

In fear of love marriage and of the stigma of love that may not lead to marriage, the parental control of the movements of young women, even to the extent of stopping their education, is practised and justified. Part of and consequent to the socially illicit colour of love marriage is the exclusion of the couple and possibly their natal families from the community with consequences for social support and the marriages of other children. Those love marriages that are likely to get parental approval in the subcontinent are those as in the conversation above – between people of compatible class and community, which can be celebrated in the manner appropriate to their communities and enable a post-wedding extended familial life, even if not extended household living. In other words, those that can be given the colour of an arranged match. Other love marriages may not be possible except through elopement, the loss of the natal family and, even then, constantly under danger of separation. One tactic adopted by parents and kin opposed to a love marriage of their daughter is to file a case that their daughter is below the legal age of marriage and consent and has been abducted. It is well-nigh impossible to estimate the spread of the practice of love marriage, the visibility of the opposition to it perhaps leading to its overestimation. The threat of love marriage to community, to control by tradition and the continuation of traditional authorities has been deeply politicized and responded to with violence. The latter is evident in the phenomenon of ‘honour killing’ and the call to fight love jehad. The first has been witnessed primarily among dominant castes across North India but also in southern parts of the subcontinent and among all castes and communities. The second – an oxymoron meaning religious war through pretensions of romantic love – is a campaign by the Hindu Right to fight intercommunity love marriages posited as a concerted attempt by Muslims to outnumber Hindus by seducing young Hindu women, taking advantage of their naivety, innocence and incapability of making decisions for their own life. In all the different articulations of love marriage, by its proponents and its opponents, there are glimmerings of ideas of whether young people, especially women, can and should make their own life choices and implications for equality and authority within marriage and the family. At the same time, many young people look for love and romance before their marriage, without any plans that it should lead to marriage. For them, especially young women, the material and emotional support of their natal kin is more reliable than the love of a man on whom they will have to depend, since so little else has changed in their economic and social possibilities.

References

Chowdhry, P. ‘Private Lives, State Intervention: Cases of Runaway Marriage in Rural North India’. Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 1 (2004): 55–84.

Khandelwal, M. ‘Arranging Love: Interrogating the Vantage Point in Cross-Border Feminism’. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 34, no. 3 (2009): 583–609.

Mody, P. The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi. Delhi: Routledge, 2008.

Orsini, F., ed. Love in South Asia: A Cultural History. Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

MAA (MĀMṢ)

Geetanjali Shree

Maa (mother) is a pivotal word in the Indian cultural lexicon. It is derived from the Sanskrit word matri, which is inherited from the Proto-Indo-Iranian maataa. It has many variants across the Indian cultural-linguistic spectrum, such as mai, maiya, maai, aai, maat, maatu, maatrikaa, maateshwari, amma, mahtaari, matahari, maadar, ammi, mummy, mom and mamma.

The inclusion of ‘mummy’, ‘mom’ and ‘mamma’ among the variants of maa is dictated by a linguistic-cultural trend which over the years has been getting increasingly irresistible. Whereas these were words that were till some time ago used only by a more anglicized upper-class section of the population, it is now part of the common person’s mode of addressing her or his mother.

Maa is a magical word. It evokes, spontaneously, some of the finest human feelings, such as love, reverence, gratitude and the readiness to sacrifice. Its temporal spread and psychocultural depth are indicated by the fact that it belongs equally to two clusters of terms selected for this lexicon – classical heritages and intimacies.

Maa, the term and the relationship, is not tied to the umbilical cord. It applies, equally, to a foster mother. Indeed, there are venerable discussions on who the ‘real’ maa is, the one who gave birth or the one who brought up the person like her own child. The mythological characters of Krishna and Karna in the Mahābhārata constitute two classic examples of this situation. Forsaken by their biological mothers immediately upon their birth for very different reasons, both treat their foster mothers as their maa. The unmatched veracity of mythological testimony apart, we have in the extraordinary bonding between Anandomoyee and Gora in Tagore’s eponymous masterpiece Gora a memorable portrayal in our own day of this phenomenon.

Not just confined within the family, maa is imbued with larger symbolic/figurative connotations embracing geography and culture. Embodying the quintessential nurturer, the term is attached to the land of one’s birth, matribhoomi (mother land; or, more specifically, Bharat Mata, Mother India), and to the language imbibed through one’s mother’s milk, matribhasha (mother tongue). The earth – the supreme nurturer – is prithvi mata. Similar deferential recognition of the sustenance, they provide, produces variants like Ganga maiya and Jamuna maiya.

Maa is also redolent with divinity. Depending upon who uses it, and the state of mind in which it is used, maa for one’s earthly mother or Bharat Mata can be suffused with divinity. Besides, there is an endless and still-growing pantheon of goddesses (devimatas), such as Parvati, Sarasvati, Kali, Durga, Vaishno Devi and so on.

Maa carries a benign aura around it. Be it an individual mother or the earth, indeed even maatribhoomi, there is no hint of evil about her. In real life, though, an individual or a group may act egregiously and still feel – even be – absolved on the pretext of the deed having been done for maa. She/it, thus, helps sustain a comforting individual and collective self-image.

This idealized image of maa rests on the excision of all but the savoury aspects of the otherwise complex phenomenon that the term denotes. It, in turn, transmits its aura to the no less complex allied phenomena denoted by derivatives like matribhoomi and, certainly in our day, matribhasha and gaumata (mother cow). This is achieved by turning a blind eye to real-life experience as also to the insights of our ancient seers and folk imagination. These insights recognize the complexity of life and relations within it, as is reflected in, for instance, the venerable pantheon of both benign and terrifying devis – matas – like Durga and Kali. In fact, mother goddesses as a genre represent not only a mother figure (fertility) often surrounded by children but also shakti (feminine energy) that not only destroys demons but – symbolizing the endless cycle of birth and death – also devours her own children. There is, besides, more specific filicide, too, like in the portrayal of Ganga who kills her seven sons as soon as they are born. (I read this story without the gloss that her filicides were meant to ease the curse of seven Vasus that they would have to be born as humans.)

The idealized patriarchal image of maa, and the intricate nexus of institutions, beliefs, values and behaviour patterns that it serves to valorize, is now coming under radical scrutiny, especially from women writers. To cite such an exceptionally powerful voice, Krishna Sobti has shown maa in her fullness. A normal person with normal needs, desires, dreams and vulnerabilities, she is a nurturer too but not the venerable self-effacing self-sacrificing nurturer. The mother – as in Sobti’s Ai Ladki – may seem self-obsessed and domineering and searing in her criticism of her daughter, without ceasing to care for her. Remember also the layers of mother uncovered in Mahashweta Devi’s intense stories, such as ‘Standayini’ and ‘Hajar Chaurasir Ma’.

I may also mention my own first novel, more so as it bears the title Mai. (The same title, significantly, has been maintained in its English, German, French, Serbian and Urdu translations.) The mother in Mai is seen by the new-age children as weak and subordinate to everyone’s wishes but in fact is silently creative and manipulative, certainly not subservient to the views or directives of the males.

And, of course, there is always the mix of the sublime with the ridiculous, the inane with the epic, the stereotype with the specific, all nonetheless resonating with the music and values around the term maa. Thus, even as this radical questioning gains edge and ground, every moviegoer in North India – perhaps elsewhere too – quotes with a smile from the movie Deewaar where Amitabh Bachchan, playing a mafia don, is silenced by Shashi Kapoor, an honest police cop and his brother in the film. Pointing to the enormous wealth he has amassed, the former asks in a taunt what the latter has. Mere pas maa hai, retorts the honest cop.

Or the joke about Jesus being a Bengali. The proof: Every Bengali mother believes her son to be God, and every Bengali son believes his mother to be pure and a virgin.

On balance, the future seems to belong, ideationally and empirically, to a new maa. With women from the middle and upper classes fast ceasing to be mere housewives and claiming perfect and substantive equality with men, the concept of maa is poised to be radically transformed. So also hopefully, as a sequel, will derivative concepts like matribhoomi.

References

Devi, Mahasweta. Breast Stories, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak . Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1997.

Devi, Mahasweta. Mother of 1084, translated with an introductory essay by Samik Bandyopadhyay. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1997.

MADRASA (MADRASĀ)

Mohd Sanjeer Alam

The term madrasa is derived from the Arabic word darasa which literally means ‘to tell something’ or ‘to teach something’. Thus, the word madrasa broadly refers to a place of teaching and learning.

Historically, the institution of madrasa has been at the heart of the evolution and progress of Islamic civilization. In the initial phase of Islamic civilization, mosques served as the locus of activities of the believers. Apart from being a place of worship, they also served as centres of teaching and learning. The teaching was confined to reading and recitation of the Quran. With passage of time and spread of Islam far and wide, a formal system of education was needed. It thus marked the separation of institutions of learning from mosques, although the latter continued to be a space for elementary learning. In course of time, a hierarchized network of institutions came into being to mark the Islamic system of education.

Structurally, Islamic educational institutions can be distinguished as maktab, madrasa and jamia. A maktab, often attached to mosque and mausoleum and mostly subsisting on local charity, is like an elementary school, where a child begins to learn the art of writing and to read elementary (Islamic) texts. After finishing maktab successfully, a child graduates to the madrasa for higher learning, where subjects other than the Quran, such as the Hadith (sayings of the Prophet) and fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), are also taught. For further higher learning there are institutions called jamia, equivalent to the general university, although in many instances a madrasa functions and labels itself as jamia. While many rational subjects, such as mathematics, sciences, philosophy and so on, began to be taught in madrasas early on, excessive focus remained on religious education, for the primary aim of madrasas has been to equip individuals with the knowledge of Islam and to produce scholars (ulema) who would be torchbearers of Islam.

In the Indian subcontinent, madrasas began to be built with the establishment of Muslim rule. But the first madrasa that finds mention in historical accounts was Madrasa Firozi built in Multan (now in Pakistan) by Nasiruddeen Qubacha. Renowned thirteenth-century Persian chronicler and historian Minhaj-al-Shiraj informs us that he was in charge of this madrasa in 1226 CE. Nevertheless, establishment of madrasas with liberal grants from rulers and nobles became common throughout the medieval period. In many cases, madrasas were also built by individual scholars and by the collective effort of people in a locality. These madrasas imparted education free of cost and to wards of both patricians and plebeians alike. Those graduated from these institutions not only became ulema, who would take Islam into the future, but many of them were also to be part of the state apparatus. Seen thus, not only did madrasas play an important role in spreading education among Muslims, they also had a multilayered functional relationship with medieval society.

However, the expansion of madrasas experienced a jolt after the 1857 uprising against the British. In the colonial administrative circles, it was widely held that madrasas were part of the conspiracy against the colonial regime. Consequently, the colonial regime blocked the resources to madrasas, which forced many of them to shut down. The new system of education introduced by the colonial regime also undermined the significance of madrasas as centres of education. For one, not only did the colonial system provide a robust alternative system of education, it was also the site of educational credentials crucial to join the colonial bureaucracy. Although there were efforts at reviving the madrasa system in the nineteenth century (such as the establishment of Darul Uloom Deoband and Madrasa Mazahirul Uloom) to counter the growing popularity and influence of the colonial education system, madrasas failed to regain the glory they once had.

Estimates abound on the number of madrasas running at present. Different sources put out widely varying figures. The source of error lies in the tendency of conflating the madrasa with the maktab. Whatever may be the exact number, there are thousands of madrasas spread across the length and breadth of India. While madrasas are inclusive in their intake in terms of social class location of students, they have been known for gender-based segregation. Even in the twenty-first century, gender continues to separate madrasas as one for boys and other for girls. There are, of course, separate madrasas for girls, but their number is far less compared to boys.

Indian madrasas differ from each other in terms of the financial resources with which to operate. Most of them are run by community resources such as zakat (religious obligation to give alms or tax) and donations from affluent Muslims. By virtue of this, they stand as autonomous institutions. Yet, there are many that receive some grants from the state as well. Nor are madrasas homogeneous in terms of syllabi. The syllabus called dars-e-nizami (named after its founder, Mullah Nizamuddin) framed in the seventeenth century stressed on the teaching of rational subjects, such as mathematics, logic, philosophy and jurisprudence. The Quran and the Hadiths were marginally studied. However, it has undergone modification time and again. Another popular syllabus followed by many madrasas is dars-e-aliya, initiated in in the late eighteenth century. Under this system, a student takes fifteen years to complete education. Much akin to SSC (Senior Secondary Certificate) pattern, students are required to appear for and have to pass examinations at various levels. Apart from religious books, the syllabus includes subjects such as mathematics, sciences, social sciences and literature.

In recent decades, madrasas have come under public scrutiny for allegedly producing jihadis (encouraging militant Islam). There is tremendous pressure on these institutions for curricular reform and to bring education imparted in them into the mainstream of universal trends. Given that the primary aim of the madrasa is not to impart modern education or to produce workers for the modern labour market, the idea of modernization of madrasa would defeat its very raison d’etre.

References

Ahmad, Aziz. Studies in Islamic Culture in Indian Environment. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Qasmi, Muhammadullah Khalili. Madrasa Education: Its Strength and Weakness. New Delhi: Manak, 2005.

MODERNITY

Kavita Panjabi

Modernity, in most major Indian languages, indicates not just a sense of the current and the new but also the transient and changing. Thus adhunika, the commonest term for ‘modern’, signifies nutan (new) as well as na take tevu (that which will not last, ephemeral) in Gujarati; aajkal ka (of current times), vartaman ka (of the present) and naye zamane ka (of the new times) in Hindi; and bartaman (present), sampratik (recent) or nabin (new) in Bengali. As navina in Tamil, it indicates that which is modern or up to date.

Modernity in Europe may be dated as far back as the transformations of the Renaissance and Enlightenment; or, more specifically, to the processes of secularization and rationalization attendant on the transition from feudalism to capitalism and industrialization; or, even more recently, to the beginnings of modern warfare with the World Wars. In the Indian context, it is usually represented with reference to the beginnings of British colonialism. In the founding of India as a modern nation, the anti-colonial thrust propelled India’s critiques of Western modernity. These critiques inflected India’s self-definition about its own governance, socio-economics and scientific and technological investments. Central to Indian modernity, across the differences in vision of most of its makers, was the value of human worth, selfhood and dignity intertwined with critiques of modern forms of violence and social inequity – not surprising for a populace impacted by devastating inequities and multiple histories of subjugation.

Nehru upheld the project of modernity but was critical of Western modernity for failing ‘to have solved the basic problems of life’. His aim was to humanize science; he advocated a ‘blend of science and humanism’, Gyan Prakash observes. The destructive potential of science and technology that had already wreaked havoc during the First World War underlined Tagore’s Talks in China, as he reached out to China in the hope that an alternative vision of modern civilization could emerge from the East. The question of non-violence was of course at the core of Gandhi’s philosophy of satyagraha (civil disobedience) and his advocacy of ‘soul force’ over the ‘brute force’ taking over the modern world. Based on his critique of the violence of technology, Gandhi also elaborated an alternative vision of modernity as self-governance in Hind Svarāj. He launched a trenchant critique of ‘the craze for machinery, not machinery as such’, of the system of competitive and destructive social, cultural and political relations attendant on the accumulation of capital and the unthinking propagation of technology. Tagore declared nationalism, in the modern capitalist world, to be ‘an epidemic of evil’ because of similar reasons; he privileged ethical human values over the political in his assertion that ‘a country is not greater than the ideals of humanity’. In fact, the very first line of his Nationalism draws attention to the sectarian and hierarchical nature of society: ‘Our real problem in India is not political. It is social.’

The post-Independence Dalit critique of Indian modernity has been incisive. It issued a powerful challenge to the common sense of the secular modern in its protest against the casteist Brahmanical character of the politics of the public sphere. Ambedkar, the principal architect of the Constitution of India, argued for the criticality of the social rooting of constitutional values, emphasizing that ‘Indians today are governed by two different ideologies. Their political ideal set in the preamble of the Constitution affirms a life of liberty, equality and fraternity. Their social ideal embodied in their religion denies them.’ And Periyar, the leader and philosopher of the Self-respect Movement in Tamil Nadu, brought the focus sharply on to the everyday experience of humiliation in the lives of non-Brahmins, on to the question of ‘their very selfhood – deemed low, dishonourable and untouchable by their religion, and which had to be redeemed, re-possessed in the name of a common and universal humanity’, as V. Geetha notes.

The notion of transience, read together with the sense of the new and the present in most Indian terms for modernity, also offers a critical key to understanding the uniqueness of Indian modernity as a process of constant recasting of older or ‘traditional’ significations. Suhrud observes that Gandhi had viewed modern civilization as transient and ephemeral, implying that it was destructive and certain to be destroyed. Yet modernity in India is also marked by an ironic resilience, not as a break or departure from the past but in an underlying continuity in transformation. Reconfigurations of the substance of religion, spirituality, sociopolitical relations and material processes both undergird and serve as camouflage for political and socio-economic power struggles. On the one hand, the inequities of ‘tradition’, such as of caste and religion, continue to persist within modern political systems, transforming themselves to endure firmly. In fact, Periyar rejected Indian nationalism precisely on the grounds that ‘it sought to compromise the new with the substances of an older tyrannical religious ideology’. On the other hand, departures from ‘tradition’ draw upon the very weight of ‘tradition’ to establish themselves. So, the re-emergence of the phenomenon of ‘satī’ in Rajasthan in the 1980s had little to do with the religious myth of Parvati and Siva that it evoked; it was a new artefact of modernity, a patriarchal response to modern laws of inheritance and a culture of widow immolation propagated through a pervasive socio-economic network to secure the marital family’s control over the widow’s inheritance, as Sangari and Vaid convincingly argue.

Such reconstitutions of ‘tradition’ work both ways – they serve to reinforce older modes of patriarchal and sociopolitical power in altered contemporary contexts and they also facilitate liberal transformations, as in literary and artistic innovation. Faiz Ahmed Faiz, one of the pioneering poets of the Progressive Writers Association, drew upon the Indo-Islamic poetic tradition and the egalitarian spiritual power of Sufism to spearhead new modes of political engagement and secularization. Ritwik Ghatak broke through the limitations of atheistic approaches and drew upon transformations of religious archetypes in his films to plumb the ruptures of subjectivity resulting from Partition. Girish Karnad enacted his critique of religious beliefs and practices and ushered in a ‘modern’ sensibility through theatre, precisely by deploying history and myth to give him the distance to comment on contemporary realities.

As multiple modernities were forged, fresh assessments of the ‘modern’ self-reflexive, egalitarian and progressive gendered elements of certain past ‘traditions’ also began to challenge the notion of the colonial beginnings of modernity. Were the secular and the sacred at all viewed as distinct realms by Amir Khusrau and Chaitanya or by Kabir, Mira and Bulle Shah? It is significant that they too drew upon the language of the sacred as a resource for egalitarian and secular negotiations from as early as the thirteenth century onwards. Our focus on the colonial legacy has sidestepped much else that was happening within the Indian subcontinent. The elements of modernity that underline the Sūfī, Bhakti and Sant traditions, for example, press for the need to rethink the very basis of periodizing modernity that we have settled for across South Asia.

Finally, one of the most telling features of modernity is the silence which shrouds the internally conflicted subjectivity resulting from Partition. Over 14 million people were displaced across both borders between India and Pakistan and over one million were killed; as the World Wars and the Holocaust underlined twentieth-century modernity in Europe, so did the experience of Partition in this subcontinent. Political subjectivity was reoriented along nationalist, even jingoistic lines. Yet the loss of a homeland continued to haunt processes of interiority in critical ways – both immediately and later in nationalist and communal or fundamentalist appropriations. Literature and art became sites ‘for the elaboration of a selfhood at odds with the geometry of selves put into place by partition’, as Aamir Mufti observes. The struggle against a divided sense of self and the devastating impact of violence made for groundbreaking lyric poetry and a powerful body of hard-hitting prose, such as that of Faiz and Manto. Yet, in the literary periodization of the Adhunik (modern) period there is no classificatory acknowledgement of the radically modern transformations catalyzed by Partition. The repressed subjectivity of the experience of Partition haunts the nether realms of modernity while its sectarian appropriations ravage the Indian subcontinent even today.

References

Geetha, V. ‘Who Is the Third That Walks Behind You? Dalit Critique of Modernity’. Economic and Political Weekly 36, no. 2 (2001): 163–164.

Sangari, Kumkum and Sudesh Vaid. ‘Institutions, Beliefs, Ideologies – Widow Immolation in Contemporary Rajasthan’. EPW 26, no. 17 (27 April 1991).

Suhrud, Tridip. Reading Gandhi in Two Tongues. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, 2012.

MOHALLA (MŌHALLĀ)

Nazima Parveen

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word mohalla means ‘an area of a town or village’ or a residential ‘community’. Although the word originated from the Arabic word mohaalla, it is used in many languages, such as in English, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Turkish, Portages, Italian and German with the same meaning. In Urdu, it means a locality or a ward. Related words such as mohalladar (neighbours) and mohalladari (neighbourly feeling) to describe spatial associations are no longer used in everyday conversation in North India. But, the term mohalla still survives as a powerful marker to express belongingness.

The word became very popular in the subcontinent as the Mughal dynasty began establishing capital cities as centres of their empire between 1400 and 1750 as centres of their empire. A system of mohallas and katras (a unit of mohalla, comprising a large compound with a number of families living in different houses or residential lanes) was developed to suit the caste-craft- and class-based homogenous community structure. However, the pattern of homogeneity was contextual representing different groups residing in galies (streets) and katras of a mohalla. Although the meaning of mohalla has remained the same, its trajectory in relation to the community identified with it reveals an interesting transformation of community-space relation and its political manifestation in colonial and postcolonial North India.

Delhi is a good example to underline this transformation. Broadly speaking, the story of Delhi’s mohalla can be divided into three phases: (a) mohalla as a self-sufficient unit during the Mughal rule; (b) the evolution of mohalla as a political constituency at the time of British colonialism; and finally (c) mohalla as an antithesis to urban planning in postcolonial period.

In Shahjahanabad (the original name of what is now known as Old Delhi), different residential mohallas were interwoven with the Mughal thana (police station) system. Each mohalla came under the jurisdiction of a thana situated near to its location. The thanedar (head of a thana) policed the neighbourhood, collected duties, regulated trade and industries and kept a record of the local population and immigrants. The mohalla, in this sense, was not merely an area but also an administrative unit. These mohallas also practised kuchabandi (the practice of barricading a mohalla with high walls and a gate) and had a chowkidar (guard) for the purpose of security. These mohallas were in fact named either after the amirs (aristocrat) and nobles who lived there or a feature of the main professional activities performed by its inhabitants and/or the commodities sold in these areas. They were headed by chiefs (chowdhuries) of caste councils (panchayats). They were called meer-mohalla. The meer-mohalla settled inter-mohalla and intra-mohalla quarrels, judged disputes over land and property and decided questions on ritual status and other matters of common concern.

The events that took place after the 1857 revolt changed the way these mohallas were organized and identified in Shahjahanabad. British officials found the traditional mohalla system, especially the narrow lanes, and the practice of kuchabandi was viewed as a problem of security and surveillance. The area from Red Fort to Kashmiri Gate was cleared to establish British cantonment in the city immediately after its takeover in September 1857. As for the residential mohallas, the officials conducted a selective clearance and rehabilitation drive on the lines of the religious identity of the residents. Those mohallas that were populated mainly by people belonging to the Mughal family and the amirs, Muslims of the city in general, who were believed to be the main culprits of the uprising, were cleared as punishment. The Muslim population was resettled in and around the shehar faseel (city wall) within two years. This selective treatment of a residential population not only disturbed the traditional caste- and craft-based living pattern but also set the terms of discourse of the identification of Delhi mohallas and their political manifestations in later years.

The new form of policing the city established under the Police Act of 1861 abolished the administrative organization of the mohalla. The practice of kuchabandi was also eliminated. Mohallas came to be defined as administrative ‘wards’ in official vocabulary. Each of these wards was controlled by a non-official member of the government appointed as a member of the municipality. The introduction of local self-government in Delhi in 1883 and the debates on separate electorates established these residential wards as electoral constituencies. Eventually, these mohallas were identified as ‘Hindu-dominated’, ‘Muslim-dominated’ and ‘mixed’ political constituencies. The use of terms like ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ paved the way for the articulation of collective claims over space, further complicating the meanings of belongingness. These developments completely transformed the way communities associated themselves with their residential space in the later years of colonial politics. A mohalla, which strongly represented the socially ingrained caste identity of residents, was identified through politically constructed Hindu and Muslim categories, which multiplied social conflicts, thereby converting the mohalla into a field of multiple contestations.

The debates on urban planning in postcolonial Delhi produced the mohalla as a contested category in all senses of the term. As an administrative unit, mohallas and overcrowded katras posed a challenge to the modern urban planner. The deteriorating condition of these mohallas led them to declared ‘unsuitable for human habitation’. Second, traditional living patterns showed an amalgamation of commercial and residential activities. The existence of small-scale industries (karkhanas) and other trades running in different mohallas also came in conflict with the parameters of city planning along modern lines. Thus, the separation of commercial and residential space became an important aspect of the redevelopment of Shahjahanabad under the first Master Plan of Delhi, 1961.

Although the word mohalla is still used in the same sense to represent a residential community, the symbols of their identification with politically constructed identities – Hindu, Muslims and now Dalit – have transformed them into the antithesis of a progressive, modern and inclusive idea of the city.

References

Gupta, Narayani. Delhi between Two Empires, 1803–1931: Society, Government and Urban Growth. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Parveen, Nazima. ‘The Making of Muslim Ilaqe’. Seminar, November 2014. Available at: http://www.india-seminar.com/2014/663/663_nazima_parveen.htm (December 2018).

NEHRUVIAN

Madhavan Palat

The term ‘Nehruvian’ is employed both in a positive sense and with a negative connotation. In the positive sense of the term, it could denote parliamentary democracy, secularism or religious pluralism, unity without uniformity, in formulaic terms, ‘unity in diversity’; Indian, rather than Hindu, nationalism; cosmopolitanism transcending nationalism; state-led industrialization through planning and the rhetoric of socialism; and carving out an independent position for the Indian state in the world, expressed as ‘non-alignment’. The pejorative connotations are democracy that did not go deep enough, secularism as pandering to minorities (especially Muslims), respecting difference to the extent of national fragmentation, as with special provisions for Kashmir or Muslim personal law; refusing to promote India as the land of Hindus or at least of Hindu civilization; cosmopolitanism as diluting Indian tradition; socialism and planning throttling economic enterprise; and non-alignment leading to insecurity and overdependence on the Soviet Union.

Parliamentary democracy was the constitutional structure chosen by the Constituent Assembly in 1949, but it is peculiarly associated with India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, because of his unflinching adherence to its principles and the respect for its institutions. By democracy, he understood the parliamentary and multiparty variety and not democratic dictatorship through electoral legitimation. But he also understood it as a mass democracy, that is, an electoral system with adult suffrage. He multiplied democratic institutions, hence the panchayati raj (democracy at the local level of the district and the village). In the event, it was three-tiered, the Parliament at the apex, the state assemblies in the provinces and the panchayats below them. His firm commitment to these institutions and their practices has contributed decisively to the Indian understanding of political life; few can imagine an Indian democracy that would be plebiscitary, however charismatic the leaders who offer themselves from time to time; and still less can they imagine a military dictatorship in India.

Secularism is quintessentially Nehruvian. This implies allowing all religions and communities the freedom to function provided they did not hinder the rights of other communities. It does not entail rejection of any religion and still less any form of persecution of one. On the contrary, it calls for respecting the minority communities, whichever they were, and making special provision for the protection of their culture and practices. But this runs counter to the pure logic of majoritarian democracy, which therefore denounces such secularism as favouring minorities. Nehruvianism is a liberalism that imperatively embeds a minority discourse within the democratic one.

Nehruvian nationalism is what is known in nationalist theory as civic and, in India, as secular. It is inclusive and composite, with every Indian citizen finding a place equal to that of any other; this is Indian nationalism, set off against all other nationalisms that are exclusive or ethnic, in particular Hindu nationalism. Other nationalisms, whether Muslim or Sikh, or of tribes and regions, are minorities within India and cannot pretend to be Indian nationalism. However, Hindu nationalism can and does claim to be Indian nationalism on the ground that Hindus are in majority. The Nehruvian rebuts this claim.

It also goes beyond the nation to global citizenship. It is only a stepping-stone to the ultimate goal of arriving at a single, if diversified, civilization of humanity. Hence, nationalism is not a final end and acts as a constraint to the cosmopolitan ideal. His support to the demand for the continued use of English in India is deplored as an aspect of such cosmopolitanism.

‘Unity in diversity’ is pendant on nationalism. It sustains both the unity of the Republic and of local cultures. This is regarded as both high statesmanship and as pursuing contradictory goals. It allows space for those who wish to integrate India through a single culture; but it also permits multiple local ones to flourish under this umbrella, constitutionally in each of the states. For this reason, the Nehruvian vision has been accused of both imposing homogeneity and tolerating fragmentation.

Planning and socialism, upheld and derided as Nehruvian, derive from the state-led strategy of development and never were independent values in themselves. As the state cannot function like a private capitalist, it structures economic development through a national plan. Socialism was the rhetoric employed; but India was never a socialist economy and Nehru did not intend it to become one, although he periodically declared his preference for it while deploring Soviet and other forms of communism. The developmental state was the Nehruvian ideal; but its instruments, both planning and socialist rhetoric, are now understood as Nehruvian.

Nehruvian also denotes non-alignment. This is a foreign policy goal which aimed to preserve Indian independence of choice in a global polarization and division into armed camps during the Cold War. It was neither neutrality nor an attempt at forming another bloc, as Nehru repeatedly explained. While independence in foreign policy retains its primacy today, its specific form as non-alignment has atrophied since the end of the Cold War.

References

Arnold, David. ‘Nehruvian Science and Postcolonial India’. Isis 104, no. 2 (2013): 360–370.

Sangari, Kumkum. ‘A Narrative of Restoration: Gandhi’s Last Years and Nehruvian Secularism’. Social Scientist 30, no. 3/4 (2002): 3–33.

PARIVAR/SAMAJ/BIRADRI (PARIVĀR/SAMĀJ/BIRĀDARĪ)

Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay

Going by the dictionary meaning, parivar denotes the smallest unit and comprises a group of people who are members of a family, related to one another by birth and/or marriage. Samāj is numerically and socially larger and can normally consists of either several parivars or individuals and designates a community connected by commonality of faith, pursuit, shared objective or social identity. Associations formed on basis of caste, community and creed are often established to impart an identity that is distinctive from the rest in society. These are set up chiefly with the intention of preserving cultural traditions, securing rights, pursuing projects, holding festivals to further heritage and identity and to promote social interaction within the samāj.

Biradri too is almost similar, although in certain regions and among specific communities, it is moderately more expansive and historically, its members were interlinked by patronage as well as kinship. Because of its origin in Persian and subsequent integration into linguistically inclusive Hindustani, biradari is often used as a counterbalancing and inclusive idea as against the relatively shuddh or puritanical Hindi words, parivar and samāj which in recent decades in India have also been used as a lapel of exclusion by the Indian right wing. However, there are still large swathes in South Asia where language is not religion-specific and samāj and biradri are not exclusionary.

Biradri is also used as suffix for socially inclusive initiatives that are not specific to a single caste or community, while parivar and samāj when utilized consciously do not reach out beyond rigid social identities. Biradri is treated as a concept to bond too inwardly, especially at times of strife, hardship and conflict when there is need to rally like-minded – or similarly-threatened – people to restore peace and harmony.

Previously, from early nineteenth century, the word samāj was used to delineate social groupings and name reform movements. These initiatives were carved out of society as mark of protest against social orthodoxy, practise and customs. The Brahmo Samaj was among the first such societies and Ram Mohun Roy’s initiative at social reform catalyzed other social endeavours, most prominently the Arya Samaj. More often than not, samāj has been used in the name of either a social reform movement or a political outfit committed to reversal of existing social norms.

Of the three words, parivar has been used most regularly in recent years, especially after the Bharatiya Janata Party and other organizations affiliated to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh began its political ascent. In the social sphere, the word parivar is used for relatives who like to display unitary identity but in the political arena, it has come to be used almost exclusively for the sangh parivar. The word is also used to disparage political families, and parivarwad or dynasticism is presented as a major aberration in Indian politics, especially in the Congress Party.

The RSS has popularized the idea of the sangh parivar, and this nomenclature is now among the most easily comprehended in India. It denotes an interwoven phalanx of an estimated a forty-odd organizations committed to the idea of Hindutva. A political fraternity, it is spread across almost every sector ranging from peasantry, working class, students, women, tribals, Dalits, middle-class professionals and lobbyists and are united by common goals and objectives. It is only in rare instances that members of the sangh parivar work at cross-purposes.

Significantly, the RSS was established without a formal name but just referred as sangh or collective. Several months after the RSS was established the name was chosen from a shortlist of four, two of which ended with the word mandal or association and the other two had sangh as the last word. It was eventually decided upon for because it was considered more intimate. Significantly, in its early years, RSS grew principally due to the personal loyalty pracharaks or preachers were able to secure among swayamsevaks or self-servers/volunteers who were inducted into the parivar.

In contemporary India, when political contestation has progressively become more strident, the three words no longer evoke what they did generically. Instead, they have emerged as flags which are either flaunted or displayed to attract other like-minded individuals.

References

Ahmed, Mughees. ‘Local-Bodies or Local Biradari System: An Analysis of the Role of Biradaries in the Local Bodies System of the Punjab’. Pakistan Journal of History and Culture 30, no. 1 (2009): 81–92.

Chaudhry, Abid Ghafoor, et al. ‘Perception of Local Community and Biradari on Panchayat: An Exploratory Anthropological Study of Biradari in Village Saroki, District Gujranwala, Pakistan’. Advances in Anthropology 4, no. 2 (2014): 53–58.

PATRIARCHY

Uma Chakravarti

Patriarchy, the term by which the contours of a set of related institutions is now understood, has been described by Sylvia Walby as a ‘system of social structures and practices, in which men dominate, exploit and oppress women’. It is important to stress the characterization of patriarchy as a system, because this helps us to reject biological determinism as the basis of difference in the power and status of men and women as well as to understand that men’s power over women is not an individual phenomenon but is part of a structure. According to Gerda Lerner, patriarchy ‘is the manifestation and institutionalisation of male dominance over women and children in the family and the extension of male dominance over women in society in general. It implies that men hold power in all the important institutions in society and that women are deprived of access to such power’. She also points out that this does not mean that women are ‘either totally powerless or totally deprived of rights, influences and resources’. It also does not mean that every individual man is always in a dominant position and every individual woman is in a subordinate position. What is important, however, is that under the system we have called ‘patriarchy’, there is an ideology that men are superior to women and that women are, and should be, controlled by men, with women regarded as the property of men.

A significant aspect of such an approach in defining patriarchies is that we can see its linkages with other institutions such as class, caste, state and ideologies (whether religious or secular); we can also grasp the fact that since the formation of patriarchy has a relationship to history and is not static but has changed, its dominance can also be ended through the struggles of women, and men, committed to a more egalitarian society.

Certain questions are central to an understanding of patriarchy: when we talk about women’s subordination to men in the patriarchal system, what exactly do we mean? In what ways do men dominate women and what do they control? In what way does their control over women link up with their control over resources and why do they need to control women at all? With the development of intensive agriculture, the exploitation of human labour and the sexual control of women became closely linked; women’s sexuality was thus sought to be controlled, and such control intensified with the development of private property and class-based exploitation. Patriarchy is related fundamentally to both class and the state and even the earliest states in history were organized in the form of patriarchy and had an interest in the maintenance of the patriarchal family.

Apart from the control over women’s sexuality under patriarchy, women’s subordination to men also enables the latter to control women’s productive or labour power. Women’s productivity within the household, and outside, is controlled by men who also determine whether women will work outside the household or not. The control of women’s labour means that men derive economic gains from the subordination of women. To maintain this double control – over women’s sexuality and their labour – women’s mobility is often stringently controlled through practices such as confining women within the house or within certain defined spaces. The entire structure of controls is facilitated by depriving women of independent access to productive resources and making them dependent on men.

Other kindred concepts are the terms ‘paternalism’ and ‘paternalistic dominance’. In their historical origins, the concepts come from family relations as they developed under patriarchy (paternalism is a subset of patriarchy) in which the father held absolute power over all the members of his household. In exchange, he owed them the obligation of economic support and protection. Further, for the maintenance of paternalism, it is essential to convince the subordinated that their protector is the only authority capable of fulfilling their needs. The most significant aspect of paternalism is that while it softens the harshest features of the system of male dominance, it also weakens the ability of the subordinated to see their subordination in political terms. At the same time, the ideology enables the dominant to convince themselves that they are extending paternalistic benevolence (rather than dominance) to people inferior and weaker to themselves.

Paternalism has been extremely successful in India, as elsewhere, and was reinforced by pre-Independence and post-Independence thinkers and policymakers, and has easily adapted itself to moderate reforms in the status of women without changing the power relations in any way between men and women in the family or in the wider society.

Two features of the system of patriarchy in terms of its ideology is that it produces consent: women ‘cooperate’ in the working of patriarchy as they provide consent to it by internalizing the ideologies of male dominance. Thus, they become complicit in the system. Cooperation or consent was in a sense extracted, rather than freely given, because of the material structure in which women were excluded as independent actors; it must be understood, therefore, that patriarchy is not merely a system, it also has a material basis.

Although the subordination of women is a common feature of almost all stages of documented history and is prevalent in large parts of the world, the extent and form of that subordination has been conditioned by the social and cultural environment in which women have been placed. Even within South Asia, there is great regional diversity in the patriarchal formations. Apart from many communities in Kerala, Lakshadweep and Northeast India, which are matrilineal (where succession passes from mother to daughter) within a larger structure of patriarchy, there are many types of family and kinship arrangements. The dominant form of patriarchy in many parts of the subcontinent has been termed Brahmanical patriarchy in recent feminist scholarship. Brahmanical patriarchy is a set of rules and institutions in which caste and gender are linked, each shaping the other, and where women are crucial in maintaining the boundaries between castes. Patriarchal codes in this structure ensure that the caste system can be reproduced without violating the hierarchical order of closed endogamous circles, each distinct from and lower or higher from the others. Brahmanical patriarchal codes for women differ according to the status of the caste group to which they belong in the hierarchy, with the most stringent control over female sexuality for the highest castes. The norms of Brahmanical patriarchy are often drawn from the prescriptive texts and shape the ideologies of the upper castes in particular, but the norms are also sometimes emulated by the lower castes, especially when seeking upward mobility.

Just as graded inequalities mark the caste system, graded patriarchies mark the nature of women’s subordination in South Asia. The mechanism of control through which both caste hierarchy and gender hierarchy were reproduced in this region is threefold: the first device is ideology, internalized by women as pativrata (wifely fidelity), whereby women aspire to chastity and wifely fidelity; second, law and custom as prescribed by texts or regional practices; and the third, the state itself, both in early history and in more recent times. In the cultural models of Brahmanical patriarchy, through its mythologies, women were socialized into believing in their own empowerment through chastity and fidelity; through the ideology of sacrifice and of passive acceptance, features of the pativrata woman, women saw themselves as achieving both sublimation and a special strength. Women then believed that they had a different and distinctive power, a higher and more spiritual power that could even bring about miracles. Working together paternalism and cultural models of womanhood virtually erased subordination; it was thus much easier for women to be complicit in the patriarchal structure that governed their lives.

Both the structure of Brahmanical patriarchy, customary and regional variations of patriarchy and paternalistic ideologies are being opposed today by democratic and egalitarian ideologies and norms enshrined in the Constitution. Movements and struggles addressing the issue of women’s subordination, their exploitation at home and outside it and the range of oppressions they experience ‘inside the family’ have been occurring in many parts of India. Along with other democratic struggles against caste and other oppressive institutions, the women’s movement has been a dynamic force in the political process; it has also spearheaded the very significant women’s studies movement, which has provided us with a set of terms by which we can understand women’s subordination.

References

Chakravarti, Uma. Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens. Kolkata: Stree, 2003.

Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

POLICE REFORMS

Prakash Singh

The police organization in India is based essentially on a legislation enacted in 1861. Its historical background needs to be understood. There was a revolt in the country against British Rule in 1857. This uprising was crushed, but it had shaken the foundations of British rule in India. The colonial masters felt that they must have a police force that would be at their beck and call and carry out their diktat, right or wrong. And so, the Police Act of 1861 was passed to raise a ‘politically more useful’ police.

After Independence, several states appointed police commissions and submitted their recommendations to the state executive, but their core recommendations were never implemented. In 1977, the Government of India appointed a National Police Commission (NPC) as it felt that ‘a fresh examination is necessary of the role and performance of the Police’. Between 1979 and 1981, the NPC submitted eight detailed reports that listed comprehensive recommendations covering the entire gamut of the working of the police. Unfortunately, these set of recommendations too received no more than cosmetic treatment at the hands of the central executive.

In a landmark judgement on 22 September 2006, the Supreme Court of India issued comprehensive directions for police reforms. These were as follows:

a) To constitute a State Security Commission in every state to insulate the police from external pressures.

b) Director General of Police (DGP) of the state to be selected from among the three seniormost officers of the department, empanelled for promotion to that rank by the Union Public Services Commission (UPSC) and, once selected, she or he shall have a minimum tenure of at least two years, irrespective of her or his date of superannuation.

c) All police officers on operational duties, such as inspector general of police (IGP) in charge of a zone, deputy inspector general of police (DIGP) in charge of a range, superintendent of police (SP) in charge of a district and station house officers (SHO), should also have a prescribed minimum tenure of two years.

d) The investigating police shall be separated from the law and order police in, to start with, towns/urban areas which have a population of ten lakh or more and gradually extended to smaller towns/urban areas.

e) Constitution of a Police Establishment Board, comprising DGP and four other senior officers of the department to decide all transfers, postings, promotions and other service-related matters of officers of and below the rank of deputy superintendent of police (DSP). This board shall make appropriate recommendations to the state government regarding the postings and transfers of officers of and above the rank of SP.

f) The setting up of a Police Complaints Authority at the state level to look into complaints against officers of the rank of SP and above and, at the district level, to look into complaints against junior officers up to the rank of DSP. These will be headed by retired judges.

g) The Centre shall set up a National Security Commission to prepare a panel for selection and placement of chiefs of central police organizations and also to review measures to upgrade the effectiveness of these forces.

The aforesaid directions were to be complied with by the Centre, state governments and the Union Territories by 31 March 2007.

The states have dilly-dallied in the implementation of the court’s directions. Seventeen states have passed laws and the rest have passed executive orders. However, these Acts and executive orders go against the letter and spirit of Supreme Court’s directions. The Centre has also not enacted the Model Police Act, even though a draft of the same was submitted by the Sorabjee Committee in 2006. Justice Thomas Committee (2008–2010), which was appointed by the Supreme Court to monitor the implementation of its directions in various states, expressed ‘dismay over the total indifference to the issue of reforms in the functioning of Police being exhibited by the States’.

Apart from the core areas identified by the Supreme Court, reforms are urgently required in some other policing related fields as well:

a) Manpower shortage needs to be addressed,

b) Infrastructure (transport, communications, forensics, housing) needs upgradation.

c) Modernization of police forces needs to be given impetus.

d) Registration of cases calls for drastic improvement.

e) Working hours of police personnel need to be limited; at present, they are considered on duty round the clock.

f) Greater promotional opportunities need to be made available for subordinate ranks.

g) Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS) project, which seeks to network all police stations across the country, needs to be implemented with vigour.

Police reforms, it must be emphasized, are not for the glory of the police. They are to give better security and protection to the people of the country, uphold their human rights and improve governance. It has been rightly said that police reforms are ‘too important to neglect and too urgent to delay’.

References

Alexander, Koshy. Police Reforms in India: An Analytical Study. New Delhi: Discovery Publishing House, 2006.

Khadem, Mohammad Bashir Mia. ‘The Emergence of Modern Policing System in the Indian Subcontinent: A Review of Major Reform Initiatives’. Social Science Review 32, no. 1 (2015): 71–86.

RTI

The MKSS collective

RTI is a contemporary Indian abbreviation for ‘Right to Information’ and is used as a noun, verb, adjective or even adverb. The RTI, defined by people’s movements in India, is not only a legislation but also a political construct. Rajasthani villagers often say that the easier word is Hindi and the more difficult English. By that definition, RTI is now a ‘Hindi’ word and has come to stay.

The RTI grass-roots movement has its origins in the struggles of the rural poor in mid-1990s central Rajasthan. The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) held its first rural jan sunwai (public hearing) in Kot Kirana, Pali district, on 2 December 1994 and demanded the right to access all government documents and the right to public audit. Through these hearings, numerous scams were exposed and the basis of the culture of secrecy perpetuated by the colonial Official Secrets Act (OSA) of 1925 was implicitly questioned. The jan sunwais galvanized both victims and perpetrators. They expanded the notion of right to information beyond the ‘freedom of expression’ (guaranteed by Article 19 of the Indian Constitution), by intrinsically connecting it to the right to life (Article 21) and to equality (Article 14), thus changing the global discourse of access to information movements.

Two years after the first jan sunwai, in April–May 1996, MKSS organized a forty-day dharanā (sit in) at Beawar in Rajasthan. The success of this protest led to the formation of a National Campaign for the People’s Right to Information (NCPRI) later that year, transforming a local struggle into a national demand for state and central legislation. Consequently, some states passed RTI legislations, and the state laws themselves and debates around them began to contribute to a pan-India build-up of the movement. The decade-long campaign by NCPRI continued with its dialectic between street protest and lawmaking. RTI became a part of the lexicon for the demand for a law in the form of ideas and slogans used widely – ‘our money, our accounts’, ‘right to know, the right to live’. ‘Social audits’ and the experience of the jan sunwais demonstrated how people could use information to actually participate in democratic governance.

The Right to Information Act was eventually enacted on 15 June 2005 and came into effect on 12 October 2005. The RTI and its use ingeniously derives from the wisdom of ordinary citizens. It requires an application on a piece of paper with a fee of 10 rupees, and the public authority is bound to respond to the application within a specified time frame. Its impact has been electric on a malfunctioning system. As one user from Punjab said, ‘The RTI has, for the first time, inversed accountability, and put the system on the mat!’ Today, a network of about sixty to eighty lakh users routinely challenge corruption and the arbitrary use of power. They call power to account right be it in a village or in the Parliament. Questions are asked every day, and parliamentary and legislative sessions alone do not anymore define ‘question time’. As a democratic tool, RTI has empowered people to participate in governance on a continuous basis. People own and support the Act. Armed with proof from official records, they have been able to establish both legitimacy and agency.

The ignominious killing of more than seventy RTI users since 2005, and the continued threat to current RTI users, has not served as a deterrent. It is perhaps the only legitimate weapon for millions of Indians who live on the margins, economically, socially and politically. It allows them to exercise their sovereignty – to change the culture of secrecy and establish one of openness. The RTI is participatory democracy in action.

A senior administrator and teacher at the national administrative training institute remarked a few years ago, ‘Administration in independent India, can be divided into “pre-RTI” and “post-RTI” eras. For the citizen, RTI has completely changed their relationship with government. “Let’s file an RTI! (RTI lagadenge!)” is a statement of resolve; a challenge to abusers of power, especially governments. The governments dread what follows an application: dismantling of power and secrecy, and drawing people into public debate. Disclosure creates an avalanche of challenges.’ As this essay is being written, the threatened power elite attempts for a third time around to amend and weaken the law – this time by reducing the independence and authority of the Information Commission, which is empowered to enforce the legislation. In response, millions who use the RTI raise their voices against this attempt to dilute the law, and the amendments are once again deferred. The RTI is destined to be a contested space; and, at the same time, it is destined to be the source of many more stories that celebrate the creative relationship of people and language.

References

Roy, Aruna and the MKSS Collective. The RTI Story: Power to the People. New Delhi: Roli Books, 2018.

RTI Assessment and Analysis Group, and the National Campaign for Peoples’ Right to Information. ‘Safeguarding the Right to Information: Report of the Peoples’ RTI Assessment’, 2009. Available at: http://freedominfo.org/documents/india-safeguarding-executivesummary.pdf (accessed December 2018).

SHAKTI (ŚAKTI)

Vrinda Dalmiya

Shakti (from the root shak, ‘to be able’) is power or force. It makes things happen. This aligns it to notions of ability and potentiality. The former captures the agential dimension of making something happen, while the latter its temporal or modal aspect – the state of possibility before and from which something emerges as real. When the ‘something’ is the world in general, shakti references that which brings it about as well as the unmanifest potentiality prior to its actualization. What is distinctive, however, is that such power is gendered: it is conceptualized – and visualized – as being feminine or female. Thus, we find here a conception of femininity that is explicitly not aligned with passivity.

In the Shakta traditions, shakti becomes the Ultimate Reality that manifests itself in different forms. It signifies the metaphysical root of the world that is of the nature of pure consciousness (jnaaana, cit), has a desire to multiply (ichhaa) and, most importantly, the capacity to change or act (kriyaa). Since emergents share in the nature of their cause, dynamic consciousness is the ‘true’ nature of all objects. In some schools of tantra, the generative moment or shakti is the free play of delight wherein consciousness imaginatively projects a ‘you-ness’ and then self-reflexively sees itself through the eyes of the latter. Thus, in the structure of awareness, the wide gap between the first person or ‘I’ and its inert object or the third-personal ‘it/that’ is mediated through the act of addressing it as a ‘you’. This address calls into being the second person which is both other to and the same as the self (paraapara or identity in difference). This intermediary space is the enabling ground of proliferation and is shakti.

When such abstract ontology is theologized and gendered, Shakti comes to signify the goddess. Female divinities as personifications of Ultimate Reality are worshipped in multiple forms – from the powerfully martial Durga, and the beneficent Lakshmi, to the terrifying Kali. Male deities now are the metaphysical ground (consciousness) that always needs activation by the goddess. This is dramatically represented in art and iconography through the figure of the ardhanarishvara – a body that is half male and half female, Shiva–Shakti. Sometimes goddesses become ‘consorts’ – separate figures attached to male divinities personifying their energy and animating force. This image resurfaces in vernacular wordplay. Men jokingly refer to their wives as their ‘shakti’ and in misogynist political humour, female leaders (like Indira Gandhi) can be referred to as ‘Shakti’ indicating unbridled (political) power like the more destructive images of the goddess.

In classical Indian philosophy of language, shakti as power appears as the capacity of a word to mean something or refer to an object. This semantic articulation of the concept has led to vibrant technical debates over linguistic signification being eternal or conventional and over the nature of this relation which is presupposed in testimonial knowledge.

References

Dupuche, John R. ‘Person to Person: Vivaraṇa of Abhinavagupta on ParātriṃśikāVerses 3-4’. Indo-Aryan Journal 44 (2001): 1–16.

Ganeri, Jonardon. Semantic Powers: Meaning and the Means of Knowing in Classical Indian Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

SCIENTIFIC TEMPER

Ranjit Nair

The phrase ‘scientific temper’ first appeared in the nineteenth century in a garden-variety sense to describe the behaviour of a scientist who loses his temper. It was the philosopher Bertrand Russell who deployed the term in the manner we do today, to connote rational inquiry untrammelled by dogma. Four decades later, in his tome Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru used it as a key marker to differentiate between medieval and modern attitudes to understanding the world and ourselves as part of it. One may plausibly argue that Nehru, who was an avid reader, acquired the phrase from Russell.

Among the leadership of the postcolonial world, Nehru stood out for his understanding of the key role that science and technology played in the modern world. ‘It is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, or a rich country inhabited by starving people. … Who indeed could afford to ignore science today? At every turn, we have to seek its aid. … The future belongs to science and those who make friends with science.’ Max Perutz, a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, in his collection of essays entitled Is Science Necessary? highlights this statement by Nehru and gives as an example of the Green Revolution which M. S. Swaminathan was able to bring about, ensuring that food grain production kept pace with India’s rising population.

For Nehru, the scientific temper carried larger social implications. According to him, ‘The scientific approach, the adventurous and yet critical temper of science, the search for truth and new knowledge, the refusal to accept anything without testing and trial, the capacity to change previous conclusions in the face of new evidence, the reliance on observed fact and not on pre-conceived theory, the hard discipline of the mind – all this is necessary, not merely for the application of science but for life itself and the solution of its many problems.’

At the helm of affairs as prime minister of free India, Nehru acted on his belief that scientific temper was key to national development by establishing institutions of higher education and research at a furious pace, as if to make up for opportunities lost during the long night of colonial subjection that had reduced the country to abject penury. Nehru valued the company of scientists and was instrumental in creating a chain of national laboratories, several Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the nuclear and space programmes, setting India on track to become a major world power in the twenty-first century. In 1946, in fact, Nehru had jumped the gun, averring that ‘India today is one of the four great powers of the world’ – yet this was by no means an unreasonable statement, considering the carnage inflicted by the Second World War in the European and Asian theatres of war to which he was witness.

In 1926–7, Nehru visited several European countries and was impressed by the Soviet approach to planned development, which he viewed as an application of the scientific approach to social affairs. On his return, he wrote to Mahatma Gandhi, expressing disagreement with the Ram rajya ideal that the latter extolled. Yet, when Aldous Huxley charged Gandhi (and Tolstoy) with advocating mass slaughter by rejecting modern science, Nehru wrote to Huxley that he had committed a ‘grave wrong’ and that Gandhi’s attitude to science was ‘very far from being hostile’ and that he welcomed its benefits. It was because the colonial power’s industrialization had destroyed traditional Indian industries that Gandhi was critical of modern industrialization and taken to reviving cottage industries which could mitigate, to some extent, widespread immiserization across rural India. He argued that free India, rid of colonial parasitism, would undertake rapid industrialization.

Scientific temper was written into the Constitution of India in 1976, vide the Forty-Second Amendment, in Part IV-A Article 51-A, on the ‘Fundamental Duties’ of citizens, of which Article 51-A (h) enjoins citizens ‘to develop scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform’. With Prime Minister Indira Gandhi having declared a national emergency, these amendments did little for the cause. In 1981, a group of scientists and academics associated with the Nehru Centre in Bombay issued a ‘Statement on Scientific Temper’ that castigated the rise of obscurantism and superstitious beliefs. A ‘Counter-Statement’ was then issued by the social psychologist Ashis Nandy who charged the signatories of elite disdain towards ‘vulgar common folk’ and advocating instead a ‘humanistic temper’, which was welcomed by traditionalists.

Scientific rationalism is often seen as subversive of religious dogma and rightly so. Belief in miracles and hatred towards rationalists who debunk them has angered traditionalists within the religions of India. Some rationalists have been murdered and others have become voluntary exiles fearing for their lives. Scientific temper, however, remains alive and well for the most part, despite being dangerous to the health of its advocates.

References

Singh, Baldev, ed. Jawaharlal Nehru on Science and Society: A Collection of His Writings and Speeches. New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, 1988.

Nair, Ranjit, Review of Baldev Singh (ed.) in Seminar 363, November 1989.

SELF-RESPECT

V. Geetha

Self-respect might appear a word that needs no gloss. For most people, it signifies a human disposition that is taken for granted. Historically, the term has a distinctive valence, particularly in the Indian context. It is associated with an anti-caste movement that emerged in colonial South India, in the province of Madras in the 1920s. Identified with its founder E. V. Ramasamy (or Periyar, as he was known) and his iconoclastic, rational and atheistic world view, the movement set itself against a social order founded on the basis of caste divisions and given to the practice of untouchability and women’s subordination.

The self-respect movement emerged as a response to the Indian nationalist movement under the leadership of M. K. Gandhi. It took issue with nationalists on the question of social justice or the importance of recognizing caste-based discrimination and inequality and working to remedy it – through envisioning and putting into practice a system of communal representation that would ensure that Dalits and non-Brahmins access higher education, government posts and places in the legislature in proportion to their numbers in the population. Unconvinced of the Indian National Congress’ intent in this regard, Periyar, originally an ardent follower of Gandhi, broke faith with the party and subsequently with Gandhi. Periyar was dismayed by Gandhi’s continued endorsement of varnashrama dharma, the Hindu religious logic that sanctified caste divisions.

Periyar counterposed to the nationalist espousal of svarāj (self-rule) the ideal of self-respect. He argued that svarāj cannot be considered one’s ‘birthright’ as nationalists were wont to, since one’s birth was determined on the bases of caste. Rights assigned on the basis of caste were discriminatory, argued Periyar, and therefore one ought to work against the logic of birth-based social status before one could claim self-rule as one’s birthright. What was desirable in this context therefore was not self-rule but self-respect. For, in caste society, one was told to respect one’s so-called superiors and look down on one’s so-called inferiors. This did not and could not make for a healthy sense of the self, and it was important for caste selves to be transformed – and such remaking was to be achieved through the practice of self-respect.

To respect oneself meant myriad things in Periyar’s semantic universe and the meanings of the term were actualized in plural ways by those who came to be part of the self-respect movement. The movement came to protest the following: the hegemony of Brahmins in modern political and social spheres; the hold of religion, particularly obscurantist beliefs and practices, presided over by a pliant and corrupt priesthood, composed of Brahmins; the authority of the rich; and finally, the power and privileges that men had and withheld from women. Positively, self-respect became the badge of a creed that espoused social and political comradeship in place of caste-based social relationships; social equality, including gender equality; women’s freedom, especially when it came to matters to do with marriage, motherhood and divorce; a rationalist world view; atheism or, at the very least, a critical attitude towards faith and scripture pertaining to all religions; and in a broad sense, socialism.

When aligned to political ideas, the notion of self-respect referenced a distinctive politics. Periyar argued that for a self-respecter socialism would have to be more than a question of economic justice and embrace what he termed samadharma, as opposed to manudharma (the creed of the Manudharmashastra, which justified social inequality). Samadharma pertained to the realm of common and inalienable rights that accrue to all of us as human beings and it had to be brought about through the repudiation of the caste order. In this sense, self-respect-samadharma represented an ethics that would help refashion the self, freeing it as it were from the stranglehold of caste, even as socialism freed all from an exploitative economic system.

The self-respect movement was unique in that it sought to create alternative cultural and social practices, including, of self-respect marriages – which were now deemed contractual rather than sacramental and not requiring the presence of a Brahmin priest to solemnize the conjugal tie. The self-respect marriage was rendered legal only in the 1960s though such marriages were in vogue right from the 1920s! Other cultural practices included putting in place a repertoire of songs and music on self-respect themes, building self-respect theatre forums, reading and propaganda groups and evolving an alternative journalism. Self-respecters were committed to a rationalist world view and many were avowed atheists who thundered against all faiths, yet their greatest ire was reserved for Hindu practices and beliefs.

The self-respect movement was committed to social revolution and looked to the state to enact appropriate legislation to enforce radical and modern ideas of equality. Politically, it endorsed socialism, but its followers were not all socialists. Some were nationalists, others socialists and yet others came to endorse Tamil nationalism. In 1944, a substantial number of self-respecters became part of a new organization, the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK), formed to safeguard Tamil or Dravidian political and social rights and interests on the eve of Independence. The DK protested the idea of India and argued for a more federal polity, including the right of provincial ethnic, linguistic and other groups to secede and form nation-states of their own. While the political agenda of the DK remained a piece of political propaganda, its social and cultural campaigns which targeted ‘northern’ ‘Āryan’ faith was, in essence, a repudiation of upper-caste, especially Brahmin, dominance and authority in matters of culture, religion and politics.

References

Geetha, V. and S. V. Rajadurai . Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar. Kolkata: Samya, 1998, reprint, 2008.

Pandian, M. S. S. ‘Towards National-Popular: Notes on Self-Respecters’ Tamil’. Economic and Political Weekly 31, no. 51 (1996): 3323–3329.

SEVA (SĒVĀ)

Tridip Suhrud

The garden is magical, the distant hilly sky crimson, the two faces aglow with light, almost beatific light, the younger man clad in translucent dhoti sits pressing the legs of an older man in a diaphanous lower garment which is undone. In the distance an undecipherable image, like God who shall not be captured by human eye and three figures, one of them unmistakably of a woman, in meditative silence or a conversation so deeply intuitive that words are superfluous. This is Bhupen Khakkar’s 1986 oil on canvas ‘Seva’, one of the most evocative paintings of modern India.

The painting captures the entire gamut of meanings – said and unsaid, uttered and inarticulate – of the act called seva, translated all too often as ‘service’. Seva is derived from saha and eva meaning ‘together with’. It is suggestive of a mode of being in the world, with nature and with fellow beings as also with the divine who refuses to reveal her true nature. Understood thus, seva is the epitome of fellowship, of a state of communion with the self, other beings and the divine.

By its very root meaning, seva is an act performed with others and also for others. Seva cannot be self-serving, self-aggrandizing, self-seeking. Even the search of the self in seva is through this act of communion. It is an act of being with others, being that is non-acquisitive, being that seeks only to serve that pain is alleviated, suffering made bearable, joy experienced and the divine made immanent. This makes seva the preferred mode to be free from sin, and if one cannot be free from sin, for atonement. Seva creates a fellowship based on shared pain and care of those in pain. To care is to perform seva.

Such a mode of being in the world has been described in the Bhagavad Gita as a state of yajna, as sacrifice not of the others but of the self, through unattached service. Thus, seva and yajna are used interchangeably, or the term sevayajna is coined. Herein lies the attraction of the life of seva. Seva is also both a vocation of freedom and a paean to it. It is a mode of freedom where freedom is sought and experienced not as an assertion but by a process where the self is surrendered to others in and through service. The greater the surrender, the deeper the freedom. And yet, or perhaps for that very reason, seva is an act of self-volition. In this sense, seva is the complete opposite of servitude and slavery, where both self and self-volition are denied.

For these reasons, seva has captured our imagination. It allows for a search of the divine by being in the world as an act of service. This very ideal moves the philosophy and practice of relatively recent religious formations like the Sikhs. The practice of kar seva, bodily service rendered to others and through them to truth, captures (despite its horrific and destructive usage as we have rendered) the spirit. In the last century and a half, seva acquired an organizational structure, for example in the formation of the Ramakrishna Mission, wherein the age-old institution of sanyasa (of renunciation) is sought to be imagined as a life of unceasing service unto others. Seva found a different embodiment in the life of Charles Freer Andrews, who sought to combine a Christian dedication to the poor and the disposed with an impulse of seva such that he became a deen bandhu (brethren of the poor, literally but more beautifully ‘a poor brother’ as well). For many dying, emaciated, neglected and forgotten Saint/Mother Teresa embodied seva, which has few parallels in our lives and times.

It was M. K. Gandhi who brought seva from a personal, religious, ethical universe into the realm of the political. If his personal god was Satyanarayana (Truth as God), it was equally true of Daridranarayana (Poor as God). If Satyanarayana takes one to satyagraha and svarāj, Daridranarayana takes one to asteya (non-stealing) and aparigraha (non-possession or poverty). An ethical person, for Gandhi, is one who recognizes the pain of others. And together, they create a mode of freedom where the ethical is ever present not only as a philosophically negotiated ground but also as the last person, the most dispossessed, the ‘meekest’ her that we have been ‘together with’, been sevak of.

Violence is the perfect opposite of seva. Seva as service, as care, as non-acquisitive selflessness is a necessary condition for ahinsā (non-violence or, more aptly, love). Violence unto the others occurs when they are pushed outside the realm of care and of seva. Seva denies the legitimacy of violence as an act of freedom, as more we take to violence, the more we recede from ourselves. Violence is denial of the self, seva is affirmation of the self, living together with others.

References

Ciotti, Manuela. ‘Resurrecting Seva (Social Service): Dalit and Low-Caste Women Party Activists as Producers and Consumers of Political Culture and Practice in Urban North India’. The Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 1 (2012): 149–170.

Handy, Femida, et al. From Seva to Cyberspace: The Many Faces of Volunteering in India. Delhi: SAGE Publications India, 2011.

SARVA SHIKSHA ABHIYAN (SARVA ŚIKṢĀ ABHIYĀN)

Vimala Ramachandran

SSA is the abbreviation for Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, a campaign by Government of India to ensure education of all children. Following the World Education Conference held in Jomtien, Thailand, in 1990, a global campaign for universal primary education, popularly known as ‘Education for All’ or EFA, was launched. It took time to set root in India. It was only in 2000–1 that the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) of the Government of India announced an ambitious programme of universal elementary education. This meant ensuring education for all children in the 6–14 year age group by ensuring them access from grade one to grade eight. This programme was called Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (literally, ‘Education for All’ campaign). According to the MHRD website, ‘SSA (sought) to provide for a variety of interventions for universal access and retention, bridging of gender and social category gaps in elementary education and improving the quality of learning. SSA interventions include inter alia, opening of new schools and alternate schooling facilities, construction of schools and additional classrooms, toilets and drinking water, provisioning for teachers, regular teacher in service training and academic resource support, free textbooks and uniforms and support for improving learning achievement levels/outcome.’

Since 2003, when SSA covered the entire nation, the term has become synonymous with universal elementary education. Today, the term SSA is used to denote school education in newspapers, reports and common everyday conversation on education. Interestingly, when we use SSA we essentially refer to government efforts and government schools and not private schools and private efforts in the same direction. Equally significant is the common perception that SSA means free education. Since the mid-2000s some non-governmental organizations, such as Pratham India and Educational Initiatives, have started assessing what and how much children are learning as a result of this intervention. Their work indicates that SSA is essentially about brick-and-mortar inputs to augment school infrastructure and hiring more teachers. Their argument was based on the finding year after year that over 50 per cent of children in grade five cannot read grade two text or do simple arithmetic problems. As a result, at least in the public perception, SSA is perceived as an opportunity for rent-seeking and corruption – with the accent on utilization of infrastructure budget, ticking off completion of activities like the mandatory twenty-day teacher training, providing ramps for differently abled children and so on. In 2006, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India’s report on SSA highlighted the siphoning off of several crores of rupees meant for training and purchase of teaching and learning material. This assessment was reiterated in 2017.

SSA is essentially a Hindi phrase that has now been accepted across the different linguistic regions of India. While it started as a specific programme, over the last seventeen to eighteen years (since 2001) it has come to mean something specific – the government schooling system. The abbreviation is used as a word by the media and sometimes even in scholarly articles. It denotes the Indian way of centralized top-down planning and implementation of school education programmes. I say ‘the Indian way’ because if one reads the rhetoric of SSA, it speaks of bottom-up district planning to ascertain needs and provide solutions. However, in reality the programme provides a tight template that districts and state administration are required to use to plan. The template is linked to strict financial norms – and regardless of whether a district is based in a remote mountainous region or a flood-prone coastal area – the financial norms for building, for pupil–teacher ratios, for academic and administrative supervision are the same.

References

Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). ‘Sarva Siksha Abhiyan’. Available at: http://mhrd.gov.in/sarva-shiksha-abhiyan (accessed 29 September 2017).

Ramachandran, Vimala and Prerna Goel Chatterjee . ‘Evaluation of Gender and Equity Issues under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan’. Indian Journal of Gender Studies 21, no. 2 (2014): 157–178.

SUDHAR (SUDHĀR)

Tridip Suhrud

Before svarāj, both in the sense of self-rule or home rule and rule over the self, captured the imagination and aspirations of people of the Indian subcontinent, it was sudhar or its cognate sudharo which had moved the people of the subcontinent in the second half of the nineteenth century. Sudhar is su-dhar, the good path and also the one that holds, contains. It is in the former sense that the term was used and the practice attendant to it was created. The idea was represented in English most prevalently by the term ‘reform’.

At the most immediate level, what had to be reformed, reshaped, created anew was the self, the person and, at a larger, more basic level, the civilization. The second half of the nineteenth century was marked by this anxiety, this endeavour. It was also marked by equally deeply felt need to resist this move to cast order of things anew. In theory and practice, sudhar involved thinking anew the practices related to worship, food, dress, conjugality, relationship with others – both individually and societally – and advent of new modes of doing things and thinking about these newer modes. Sudhar, though externalized, was in a fundamental sense about the self, the person as an autonomous, individuated being. And yet, not surprisingly, the battleground was the subjectivity, the minds and the bodies of women. Women had to bear the burden of being the primary bearers of continuity, tradition and also change. The desire to reform and to conserve forced men to engage with the ‘women’s question’ in a manner never evident before.

The practice of self-examination gave rise to two forms of cultural self-expression: the autobiography and the novel. The former was predicated upon the autonomous individual self and the latter on the desire to capture what Govardhanram Tripathi called ‘the drama of transition’. The self-practices of the reformers came to be identified with the modern. And still, the chasm between thought, aspiration and practice gave rise to deep ambivalence both among those who sought to reform and those who wished to conserve. The present for both became oppressive and they sought release from it in either an imagined future or in a fantastic past which would make the future more bearable.

The desire to recast the self and society gave rise to a quintessentially modern and ‘secular’ institution called ‘society’ (samāj) or as the Gujarati term goes mandali. As an organizational structure, samāj is the harbinger of the modern artefact called the political party. The demand for political reform followed after the need for reform of the self and society. During much of the second half of the nineteenth century, sudhar, reform and hence the modern was a positive value, an aspiration worth cultivating and emulating. This conception of sudhar was questioned and, for some time, altered by M. K. Gandhi, who in his philosophical dialogue, Hind Svarāj, spoke of sudhar in multiple semantic frames. For Gandhi, sudhar was civilization, modern civilization, ephemeral civilization, change, progress, reform and that which will destruct itself. For Gandhi, modern civilization had enslaved India. This formulation of Sudhar as the oppressive and enslaving impulse sought to change both the conception of sudhar and the practices attendant to it. Gandhi argued that India’s salvation lay in svarāj, as rule over the self, where the performance of duty and recognition of morality was the ground from which civilization, true sudhar emerged and was sustained. In performance of duty and in moral action lay Gandhi’s mode of being in the world, which was seva (service to others). Sudhar was that mode of conduct which allowed one to perform seva and through that claim for oneself the capacity for self-rule.

This conception of sudhar as that which de-civilizes and of ‘true’ sudhar as one that enables freedom remains unique to Gandhi. This usage was not something that Indians of his times or the times after him were and are ready to accept and adopt. The liminal space that Gandhi’s Hind Svarāj occupied in his times and the contests that we have with it today emanate largely from Gandhi’s insistence that sudhar is not a civilizing idea but its opposite, one that grounds under its heels human autonomy and self-volition. By casting aside this conception, contemporary India has restored a largely positive value to the term sudhar and our search for self-volition continues to be in the realm of the modern.

Reference

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand. Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule. Madras: GA Natesan and Company, 1921.

SUKH-DUKH (SUKH-DUKH)

Aditi Mukherjee

The expression sukh-dukh has two constituents: sukh and dukh. Independently, they seem to be in a binary relationship, representing two poles of experience. Literally, ‘sukh’ would approximate to ‘happiness, well-being, joy’ and ‘dukh’ would mean the opposite, that is, ‘unhappiness, misery, distress’. However, these two words are often paired together, with mutually exclusive meanings, in Indian philosophy and literature. The following line from Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 2, verse 38) can be cited as an example: Sukha dukhe same kritwa laabhaalaabhau jayaajayou (‘happiness distress treat alike, gain and loss, victory and defeat’). That is, in the battlefield at Kurukshetra, Lord Krishna urges Arjuna to treat happiness and distress, loss and gain, victory and defeat with equanimity. A similar pairing is found in the Hitapodesha to indicate that happiness and unhappiness in life rotates like a wheel: chakravat parivartante dukhani cha sukhani cha (‘like a wheel it undergoes cyclic change from sorrow also and from happiness also’). The Sūfī saint-poet Kabir says, Dukh mein sumiran sab kare, sukh mein kare na koye/Jo sukh mein sumiran kare, to dukh kahe ko hoye (‘Everyone prays to Him when they are unhappy, none remembers Him in happy times/if one prayed at happy times, why should unhappiness come’).

In all the three examples above, sukh and dukh are juxtaposed as semantic opposites. However, when sukh and dukh are joined to form the compound ‘sukh-dukh’, the semantics is no longer binary or additive as sukh plus/and dukh. The meanings of the constituent words do not add up to give the meaning of the whole compound. Like the Yin and Yang, an element of complementarity is introduced. The semantics is now non-compositional and covers an entire spectrum with a wide range of experiences between the two seemingly opposite poles of happiness and unhappiness. Such non-compositional compounding is quite common in Indian languages. The spectrum could be: (a) spatial: as in upar-neeche (above-below), aage-peeche (front-back), idhar-udhar (here-there), yahaan-vahaan (here-there); (b) temporal: as in subah-shaam (morning-evening), raat-din (night-day); (c) transactional: as in lena-dena (to take-to give), naap-tol (measure-weight); or (d) experiential: as in sukh-dukh (happiness-unhappiness). Following are some contexts where sukh-dukh is used to cover a range of emotions and experiences which need not necessarily consist of either sukh or dukh. The first two are from Hindi, the third is a Bengali sentence and the fourth is a Telugu sentence: Sukh-dukh mein padosi kaam aate hain (‘Neighbours come in useful in all situations’); Aao thodi der baithkar sukh-dukh ki batein kar lein (‘Come, let us sit down and share our life experiences’); Dui bondhute mile onek sukh-dukher kotha holo (‘The two friends met and chatted shared their life experiences’); and Waaru sukha-dukhaalu pacchkunTaaru (‘They shared their life experiences’).

References

Easwaran, Eknath. The Bhagavad Gita:(Classics of Indian Spirituality), vol. 1. California: Nilgiri Press, 2007.

Grover, Shalini. Poor Women’s Experiences of Marriage and Love in the City of New Delhi: Everyday Stories of Sukh aur Dukh. Diss. University of Sussex, 2005.

SWARAJ (SVARĀJ)

Dunu Roy

The teeming cauldron of mass dissent against English rule in India exploded into what the imperialist English called the Mutiny of 1857 but later nationalist Indian historiographers termed as the First War of Independence. Thus, ‘dissent’ may be seen differently by those who face it and those who create it. Much the same may be said for the word swaraj (literally, ‘self-rule’) when, two decades after the ‘mutiny’, Dayananda Saraswati, founder of the Arya Samaj, first used it to project a vision of ‘India for Indians’. But he was not just posing it as liberation from English rule; he was equally, if not more, concerned about the cultural degradation of Hindus and the many forms of idol worship and rituals that took away from ‘Vedic purity’. In the manner of many ascetics, he wandered for almost twenty-five years in spiritual pursuit of the ‘truth’ before writing Satyarth Prakash to throw light on the meaning of truth as revealed in Vedic writings.

At the same time, he was a vocal advocate of equal rights for women, education for all, a staunch critic of caste discrimination and child marriage and a votary of scepticism and rationality. His eclectic preaching and the public debates he had with other Sanskrit scholars had a galvanizing effect on the nationalists of the times, influencing spiritualists like Madame Cama and Swami Shraddhanand, Hindu conservatives like Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Lala Lajpat Rai as well as revolutionaries such as Ram Prasad Bismil and Ashfaq Ullah Khan – each charmed by swaraj in their own way but all coming together in the tumult of the struggle for freedom.

It should, therefore, not be surprising that two decades later, in 1898, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, another scholar of Sanskrit who wrote a commentary on the Bhagvad Gita, gave the clarion call: ‘Swaraj is my birth right and I shall have it.’ Through his two newspapers, Tilak exposed the cruelties and excesses of British rule and raged against the suffering of the mass of Indians at the hands of their colonial masters. He denounced the famines and epidemics as a result of misrule and was an outspoken critic of the moderate policies of the Indian National Congress. His swaraj, therefore, did not denote religious reform but a radical departure into sampoorna swaraj (full freedom).

Another decade later, M. K. Gandhi picked up from both Saraswati and Tilak and wrote Hind Swaraj. Acknowledging that, ‘No one realised the evil of the existing system of government as Tilak did’, Gandhi went beyond Tilak to postulate his swaraj, which transcended merely getting rid of the Englishman and posed a moral challenge to the evil of the Englishman’s system of government, its institutions, its foundational beliefs and its unjust, exploitative and alienating structures as seen through the lens of a colonized people. Thus, Gandhi visualized a completely different set of structures, with self-respect, self-realization and self-responsibility integrated into self-rule.

Thus, prior to the English leaving the subcontinent to its own devices (although there was much that the subcontinent internalized from English rule, such as its body of law, its governance and administration, the armed forces and concepts of ‘development’), the meaning of swaraj may be seen to emerge in the three dimensions of religious reform, political freedom and moral reconstruction – as represented by the three stalwarts Saraswati, Tilak and Gandhi. A major difference between the three was that while Saraswati and Tilak tried to reform or revolutionize Hindus on the basis of past glories, Gandhi tried to draw all faiths into his call for a secular future.

The idea of freedom embodied in swaraj also resonated in the call for swadeshi (‘of our country’) given by Surendranath Banerjea (who was dismissed from the Indian Civil Service) to protest the partition of Bengal in 1905. In 1906, Dadabhai Naoroji (a cotton trader who was the first Indian to be elected to the House of Commons) was inspired by Saraswati to declare swaraj as a political objective when delivering the Presidential Address at the Indian National Congress. In 1923, Motilal Nehru and Chitta Ranjan Das constituted the Swaraj Party to contest elections to the Central Legislative Assembly (winning almost half the seats), before the Congress gave the call for poorna swaraj (‘complete freedom’) in 1929.

In 1938, four years before the Congress launched the Quit India movement that eventually led to freedom, there was an opportunity to realize Gandhi’s vision of swaraj, when the Raja of Aundh, Bhavanrao, was persuaded by Maurice Frydman (a Polish engineer who became Swami Bharatananda) to hand over the reins of state to his people. Gandhi helped draft the Swaraj Constitution and the administration was reorganized with village panchayats (local self-government) being elected by all adult voters to administer all services and welfare, with each panchayat choosing a president to represent them at the taluka council. For the next six years, this island of swaraj took remarkable strides, until India arrived at her tryst with destiny in 1947.

After Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, his spiritual successor Vinoba Bhave constituted the Sarva Seva Sangh to continue experimenting with swaraj, also launching the bhoodan (‘land grant’) movement in 1951. By 1955 about 2.5 lakh acres had been granted in the villages of Koraput, Orissa, for Bhave to initiate another experiment with swaraj^. Annasaheb Sahasrabuddhe, who had been part of the Aundh experiment, was placed in charge. Two achievements were reported initially: a large number of illiterate people were quickly trained for technical and managerial tasks, and the Government readily granted the funds. Yet, the experiment failed because bureaucratic procedures did not match with Gandhian precepts.

Other efforts interpreted swaraj differently. In 1956, Khasa Subba Rao began a weekly magazine called Swarajya as a ‘first coherent intellectual response to Nehruvian socialism’, championing ‘individual liberty, private enterprise, minimal state, and cultural rootedness’. In 1973, students in Ahmedabad went on strike to protest against a hike in hostel food fees, and the unrest spread to successfully demand the government’s resignation. Students in Bihar also embarked on a similar agitation and veteran Gandhian Jayaprakash Narayan declared that sampoorna kranti (‘total revolution’) was unfolding against all oppression and injustice. This tide of protest eventually led to the State of Emergency in 1975.

Some other notable examples were in 1984 when the Bhopal gas tragedy occurred and Banwarilal Sharma and Rajiv Dixit laid the foundation of the Lok Swaraj Abhiyan to summon Union Carbide to account. Later, in 1992, they also launched the Aazadi Bachao Andolan as a ‘national movement in India to counter the onslaught of foreign multinationals and western culture’. Then the Seventy-Third Amendment (which devolved power to the panchayats) was extended to Scheduled Areas in 1996, and Brahma Dev Sharma, who made significant contributions to make this possible, became the inspiration for the Hamara Gaon Hamara Raj movement in tribal areas. This later manifested as the Pathalgadi movement in Jharkhand in 2017.

The most recent development was in 2012 when Arvind Kejriwal, leader of the Aam Aadmi Party that emerged out of the India Against Corruption movement led by veteran Gandhian Anna Hazare, wrote his own version of Swaraj, arguing that political power must be decentralized to the units of direct democracy, the gram sabhas and mohalla sabhas. In 2015, a faction led by Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan formed the Swaraj Abhiyan, claiming the higher moral ground of swaraj by launching the Jai Kisan Andolan to mobilize farmers for debt relief and remunerative prices and to pursue litigation in the Supreme Court to ensure the proper functioning of the Public Distribution System.

Thus, the idea of swaraj has been resurrected time and again with different interpretations, depending on the era and context. At the core lies the notion of ‘freedom’, of charting one’s own unfettered course, but much depends upon who is seeking freedom from what and for whom.

References

Anand, Y. P., comp. ‘Hind Swaraj or The Indian Home-Rule (1909): The Gandhian Concept of Self-Rule’. Available at: http://www.mkgandhi-sarvodaya.org/hindswaraj.htm (accessed 27 May 2018).

Anjaneyulu, B. S. R. ‘Gandhi’s “Hind Swaraj”: Swaraj, The Swadeshi Way’. Indian Journal of Political Science 64, no. 1/2 (January–June 2003): 33–44.

VIRANGANA (VĪRĀṄGAṆĀ)

Usha Mudiganti

Virangana is a unique expression of Indian womanhood combining power and virtue. The Sanskrit word virya signifies the ‘heroic’ and is used for brave men, whereas the word virangana is meant to describe a woman who embodies heroism. Although a virangana seemingly blurs gender lines, there is not only an acceptance but also a celebration of such an expression of womanhood in India. It is an alternative to the image of the meek, docile and domestic Indian woman.

Despite large-scale admiration for this expression of womanhood, it is rare to come across a contemporary woman who would be given this title. For a woman to be described as a virangana, she has to take up tasks culturally deemed to be those performed by men while retaining traditionally cherished feminine traits. While there would be countless modern working women who have a successful career and are also excellent homemakers, they would not be considered viranganas. A virangana is a woman who takes up the responsibilities of a man on the untimely death of her husband and successfully performs all the duties left incomplete by the man. She is a woman who unexpectedly, but efficiently, steps into the shoes of a male predecessor and in his absence continues his struggle for a worthy cause.

India has a long tradition of queens who have been described as viranganas. There are descriptions of warrior queens in the Mahābhārata who can be called the foremothers of modern-day viranganas. Scholastic studies of the Indian Revolt of 1857 have thrown up names of many warrior queens who led their people against the takeover of their kingdoms by the British East India Company owing to Lord Dalhousie’s Doctrine of Lapse. The long list includes queens as well as common women who fought along with their queens. Some of the famous warrior queens are Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, Rani Avantibai of Ramgarh and Begum Hazrat Mahal of Awadh. Some common women who fought alongside their queens in this revolt are Jhalkaribai of Jhansi, Uda Devi of Awadh and Azizun Bai of Kanpur. These queens and common women have become ideals for many contemporary women’s rights activists. Feminist scholarship has traced an entire historical and legendary tradition of viranganas fighting for just causes and for the betterment of their people. The one thing all these warrior queens have in common is that they were trained in their childhood in the skills required for warfare and/or governance by their father or an older male relative but were married to a prince at a very young age and settled into lives within royal households till the death of their husband necessitated their stepping in as regents, at which point they showed their efficiency in governance or warfare, as was required of their particular situation. Their visual depictions usually are of a woman astride a horse and geared for war with arms and armoury but also wearing feminine jewellery.

However, some queens who never took up arms, and depicted as traditionally garbed widows, are also celebrated as viranganas. These are women who have nurtured and inspired their sons into bravery and rebellion against oppressive kings. The most famous among such viranganas is Jijabai, mother of the Maratha king Shivaji. Another such Maratha queen from the mid-eighteenth century, Ahilyabai Holkar, is known as a virangana not only for the immense amount of social work led by her in her kingdom but also for organizing a regiment of women. A couple of centuries later, another all-women regiment was formed for India’s freedom struggle. It was the Rani of Jhansi Regiment raised under Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army. It was headed by Captain Lakshmi Swaminathan and was named for the most famous virangana of the Revolt of 1857, Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi. Lakshmibai’s story circulated through folk legends, songs and poems to such an extent that the Hindi phrase jhansi ki rani has become a metaphor for bravery and is frequently used by the people and the media in India to describe a courageous young woman. The phrase has also been used as a metaphor for some modern Indian women politicians just as it is used for common Indian women who lead local struggles. Quite often, the phrase is used with a tinge of admiration to warn men against making unwelcome overtures towards a brave young woman.

References

Hansen, Kathryn. ‘The Virangana in North Indian History: Myth and Popular Culture’. Economic and Political Weekly 23, no. 18 (1988): WS28–WS33.

Singh, Harleen. The Rani of Jhansi: Gender, History and Fable in India. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

VISVA-BHARATI (VIŚVA-BHĀRATĪ)

Partha Ghose

The Sanskrit word visva refers to the ‘world’ or the ‘earth’. The Sanskrit word bharati stands for the Hindu goddess of knowledge and music, also known as Saraswati. As a name, Bharati is primarily a feminine name but was also part of the name of the great Tamil nationalist poet Subramania Bharati, who was male; or titles for members of a religious sect like Shri Krishna Chaitanya Bharati; or the name of an organization connected with teaching and research, such as India’s first research facility in the Antarctic, called Bharati. The word visva has found usage in organizations such as Vishwa Hindu Parishad, names of various firms and encyclopaedias such as the Vishwa Katha Kosha.

Visva-Bharati is the name given by Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel laureate Indian poet, to the centre of creative learning he established in 1921 at Santiniketan in West Bengal. Its motto is yatra visvam bhavati ekaneedam, a verse from the Rig Veda, which means ‘a single nest for the world’.

It was Maharshi Debendranath Tagore, Rabindranath’s father, who first visited the area in 1863, developed a special liking for it and acquired some land to build a large country house and plant tall trees. He named the house Santiniketan, the abode of peace, because he envisioned it as a sanctuary for seekers after the formless Brahman, the transcendent and immanent ultimate reality. Far from the madding crowd, it was a quiet and serene place with time for meditation and study. Debendranath put the property in the care of a trust which would operate it as an ashram (a hermitage). The trust deed also had a provision to establish a Brahmo school (along the lines of the monotheistic reformist religious movement called Brahmo Samaj). A tinted glass prayer hall was built in 1891. The asram was open to everyone, regardless of caste, creed or religion, but image worship or sectarian religious practices were prohibited. The entire area surrounding the ashram soon came to be known as Santiniketan.

Rabindranath visited the place from time to time and, in line with his father’s general approach, established a school there called Asram Vidyalaya on 25 December 1901. Studies were combined with plays and songs. Students and faculty lived simply, subsisting on simple meals and doing many menial chores themselves. The school was later renamed Patha Bhavana.

His subsequent travels and interactions with eminent people across the world led to a broader and more complex vision: the creation of Visva-Bharati. This vision, born out of Rabindranath’s personal disenchantment with rote learning prevalent in his time and his vision of the essential unity of life, was to establish a creative education centre that would stand apart from the typical educational institutions established following Lord Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Indian Education of February 1835’ whose single purpose was the mass production of ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’. On the contrary, the aim of Visva-Bharati was to understand the West from the standpoint of the East and to seek out the essential unity and humanity of the various religions and cultures of the world. Visva-Bharati combined education of children in a free and nature-loving environment, the use of music and arts as instruments for emotional development, social work to help neighbouring villages, the promotion of rural development and higher research in philosophy, cultures and so on. The key elements in the structure were the school Patha Bhavana, the centre for fine arts Kala Bhavana and the centre for music Sangeet Bhavana. Besides these, he also established a department of Chinese language and culture called Cheena Bhavana in April 1937.

In 1951, the Government of India declared Visva-Bharati a centre of national importance and passed the Visva-Bharati Act of 1951, thereby declaring it as a central university. As warned by several eminent parliamentarians who took part in the debate that followed the introduction of the Bill in Parliament, this governmental move has changed the original character of the institution because the question of equivalence of degrees across India came up, and the Academic Council of the new university decided to conform to the standards prevailing in the country. The very character of the institution that Rabindranath compared to ‘a vessel that carries the best cargo of my life’ was eventually sacrificed.

Leonard Elmhirst, who went to Santiniketan together with his wife Dorothy to help Rabindranath in his rural reconstruction work at Sriniketan, later established the Dartington Hall project in South Devon, England. Inspired by the ideals of Visva-Bharti, Dartington Hall works towards providing progressive education and rural reconstruction. This is one among many other centres across the world that have been directly or indirectly inspired by the ideals of Visva-Bharati.

Thus, the word Visva-Bharati has come to acquire the connotation of a centre of alternative education to promote peace, conservation of nature and propagating universal humanism based on ancient Eastern wisdom informed by Western values, with music, dance and seasonal festivals playing a central role.

References

Tagore, Rabindranath. My School. Montana: Kessinger Publishing, reprint, 2010.

Tagore, Rabindranath. Creative Unity. London: Macmillan & Co., 1922.

VOTE BANK

Manisha Madhava

With the adoption of the Constitution in 1950, a liberal democratic political system with modern political institutions was established in India. However, these democratic political institutions were actually superimposed on a traditional particularistic society based on caste. The interplay between these two gave rise to what is popularly referred to as the politics of ‘vote bank’. Vote bank refers to a block of voters, who on the basis of certain considerations such as caste, religion, language and identity, loyally support a particular candidate or a party in an election. The term was first introduced by the noted sociologist M. N. Srinivas in his classic The Social Structure of a Mysore Village. In Srinivas’ formulation, ‘vote banking’ involves three actors – individual voters, political parties and village-level middlemen – bound together by a vertical hierarchy of caste and ‘influenced by patron–client relationship’. The relations of patronage between voters and middlemen are mediated by caste and class, with the middleman often belonging to the higher caste and class and the masses belonging to the lower castes, obliged by social, economic and ritual ties. These ‘bonds’ between the two are mediated by relations of social trust. At election time, these social ties are activated in order to deliver votes to a preferred party or candidate. Elucidating on the Congress Party-dominated political system of India, Rajni Kothari points out that the party’s power hinged on ‘intermediate networks which take on the form of autonomous sub-systems’. Similarly, Kohli describes how the ‘Congress system’ operated through a ‘chain of important individuals stretching from village to state, and eventually to the national capital, welded by bonds of patronage’.

After Independence, support for the newly established institutions came from a coalition of interests of both caste and class. However, political institutions were largely controlled by a dominant upper-caste elite. Marginalized communities, such as the Dalits, constituted the vote banks of mainstream parties dependent on vertical relations of patronage – clients. This served the interest of the dominant caste elites in maintaining their positions within the framework of the modern democratic system. Vote-bank politics was however subject to much criticism as it militated against the notion of the individual as an autonomous, independent voter exercising her or his free political will.

The nature of vote-bank politics in India has undergone significant change over time. From 1950 till 1967, the political landscape of the country was dominated by the Congress Party, which held power both at the national and the state levels, drawing support from a broad spectrum of upper castes, middle classes, scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and Muslims. The steady decline of the Congress Party in the 1970s, due to the growing size and politicization of the Indian electorate, excessive centralization and the resultant failure to accommodate the interests of all sections as well as the rise of regional political parties altered patterns of political patronage, as Jaffrelot notes. It was, however, the implementation of the recommendations of Mandal commission in 1989 by the V. P. Singh-led National Front Government at the Centre that gave a new salience to caste and vote-bank politics. The Mandal Commission recommended reserving 27 per cent of seats in educational institutions and jobs for the Other Backward Classes (OBCs). While caste identity had always been politically important, after 1989, ‘vote bank’ was no longer what a single patron commanded. Rather, it denoted a collective political preference defined principally by primordial identity, of caste or religion or language, of a particular interest group. As Ranajit Guha points out, ‘vote banks’ are constituted by shared material or moral interests.

Dalits today constitute the core support base of regional parties such as Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Samajwadi Party (SP) and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD). Their support is not on the basis of patronage but on the basis of identity. As Chatterjee notes, ‘Community groupings are offering votes in exchange for material benefits’ and this needs to be understood as part of a broader ‘strategic politics’ through which the urban poor are making claims on the state. Another point of view, forwarded by Schaffer, is that vote-bank politics, where votes are exchanged for material benefits, lends it the character of market purchase and is more harmful to democracy than patronage and has negative implications for democratic accountability. The debate now is whether the emergence of new forms of vote banks wherein material goods and particularistic benefits are directed towards caste- and community-based social groupings in exchange for a block vote represent exploitative politics in which the poor are excluded from true democratic participation or if vote banks possess the possibility of redistribution of justice and mass emancipation.

References

Kothari, Rajni. ‘The Congress System in India’. Asian Survey 4, no. 12 (2016): 1161–73.

Srinivas, Mysore Narasimhachar. The Social Structure of a Mysore Village. Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960.

YOJANA (YO¯JANĀ)/PLANNING

Nalini Nayak and Pulin B. Nayak

The idea of ‘yojana’, or planning, has been an essential part of Indian economic thinking and its regular usage may be traced to the pre-Independence period. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, in particular, was a strong votary of planning as an instrument to bring about a rapid social and economic transformation of India’s poor and underdeveloped economy. In 1938, the Congress Party, under the presidentship of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, set up the National Planning Committee (NPC) of which Pandit Nehru was made the chairman. With the onset of the Second World War, India’s independence seemed imminent and the purpose of the NPC was to formulate policies and strategies to bring about rapid economic development in India.

In Nehru’s words, the NPC was ‘a strange assortment of different types’ but it soon set about the task of addressing the critical issues concerning agriculture, industry, education and health, among others, and the urgent task of poverty eradication and achieving self-sufficiency. It is possible to hold the view that under the NPC the state was expected to play a lead role in the development process. Soon after, there was a separate effort by several prominent businessmen, who came up with the ‘Bombay Plan’ of 1944, which acknowledged the influence of the NPC. However, the formulators of the Bombay Plan were keen to emphasize the role that the private sector and the market were to play in the national planning exercise.

On assuming the prime ministership after India gained Independence, Pandit Nehru was keen to introduce planning as a vital component of the development exercise. The Planning Commission was established on 15 March 1950 with the prime minister as its chairman. The country soon embarked on the First Five-Year Plan (1951–6) which focused on a balanced growth of agriculture and industry. A very important question centred on the issue of providing for consumption versus capital goods. A higher allocation for capital goods entailed lower consumption today but a higher growth rate for the economy that would benefit the future generations. The Second Five-Year Plan (1956–61) was formulated with the help of the statistician-physicist P. C. Mahalanobis, which placed emphasis on the capital goods sector. This was critiqued by many observers who felt that there was a neglect of the wage goods sector, which was detrimental to the development process.

During the early years of planning, the public sector was to play a crucial part in the development process. Nehru was of the view that the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy should be in the hands of the state and accordingly a significant role was earmarked for the public sector in, for example, steel, coal, heavy industries and electricity generation. The government also allocated substantial funds for education, health, science and technology, and it was during the 1950s that the state-funded teaching and research institutions, such as the IITs, IIMs, AIIMS, CSIR, etc., were given a strong push.

During the first three decades of planning, the average growth rate of the Indian economy however remained in the 3.5 to 4 per cent range. The critics of the planning process argued that the bureaucratic licence-permit system gave rise to rent-seeking and served as a fetter on economic efficiency. In 1991, under the prime ministership of Shri P. V. Narasimha Rao, with Dr Manmohan Singh as the finance minister, significant economic reforms were introduced. The market mechanism was now accorded a much greater role in the development process, though the Planning Commission still remained functional and continued to address the issue of channelizing investment into socially desirable areas. The growth rate of the Indian economy picked up substantially, and during 2005–8, the average annual growth rate of GDP exceeded 9 percentage points.

In 2014, a new government led by the Bhartiya Janata Party came into power with Shri Narendra Modi as prime minister. In a significant break from the past, the Modi government disbanded the Planning Commission. In its place, the NITI (National Institution for Transforming India) Aayog has been constituted. The age-old problems of poverty, unemployment, regional imbalance and accentuation of inequality, among others, continue to be major problems confronting the Indian economy, and it is too early to assess the performance of the new body. It is however worth remembering that if India is one of the fastest-growing major economies of the world today, the basis for this must have had something to do with the planning process that the country had adopted, howsoever imperfectly, for sixty-four years of its existence as an independent nation.

References

Chakravarthy, Sukhamoy. Development Planning: The Indian Experience. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Nehru, Jawaharlal. The Discovery of India. Calcutta: The Signet Press, 1946.