8
Sometimes titles say more than the works they name. Through all the cultural negligence of his writings, Bhudev Mukhopadhyay will be remembered for the unforgettable title of a rather inconsiderable literary work by him called Swapnalabdha Bharatvarsher Itihas.1 Translated literally, this means ‘a history of India received in a dream’, an imaginary history.
It is difficult even to say what sort of writing this is. To call it a novel is to misclassify the work; it offers us no narrative pleasures. It is an extension, but in an intriguingly paradoxical form, of his serious reflection on Indian history. It is not a significant work in any ordinary sense; but in that phrase he has given expression to a most significant cultural fact: the desire for history. He has invented a name, not for a book, but for the intellectual enterprise of his age, his class, his people, the obsessive centre of their collective mentalité.
The concern of his history is, of course, a concern with something that is illimitable and ambiguous, and people relate to this urge differently because they read the ‘problem of history’ in different ways.2 The construction he gave this question remains unique, and even unsurpassed: for he was the only social theorist that the celebrated age of the Bengal Renaissance produced; and his relation to the enterprises of his times is complex. He is of it, but also against it. Indeed, there is a deep aristocratic aloofness in his stance which would have doubtless disapproved of the phrase as unworthy of a mature people, as revealing an ambition of inauthenticity, of having a desire for a second-hand history marked in the name itself. It is not surprising that in the chronicles of the Bengali intellect Bhudev is passed over in silence.
Yet there is something puzzling in this forgetting. Whatever their failings, Bengalis are not forgetful about their cultural history. Why does their collective boastfulness not have in it place for Bhudev? His passing into oblivion indicates something besides an internal censorship of the Bengal Renaissance or its dedication to European taxonomies of ‘liberal, conservative, progressive’. It simply illustrates the trivial point that a history ‘in general’ is never written; histories are always written of conventionalized objects, narratives, searches, accounts of origins of some constituted historical entities to the exclusion of other possible ones.
Two such subjects dominate the writing of intellectual history in Bengal: the history of modern Bengali literature, and of nationalist ideology. Bhudev figures in both, but not as a central figure. He has always existed in that nondescript space where the shadows of these two narratives fall. In a literary history of Bengal he is wholly, and rightly, overshadowed by the creative versatility of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay. What Bhudev did was also of course nationalist: but he was less interested in a construction of its ideological doctrines and mythical symbols than the historical reflection that must constitute its base. Indian nationalism neglected such reflection about history, and when it felt a serious need for this, it borrowed heavily from the existing Western ideological discourses. Bhudev was not even a good revivalist, for his Hinduism was too intellectual to satisfy more demagogic tastes.3
There was something extraordinary about this sudden irruption of history in the literary discourse of Bengal in the nineteenth century. And the question of history was asked with a strange desperation. They sought history in all possible forms, of which two were most common: seeking the factual history of peoples, and writing their imaginary history through historical novels. Irrespective of their skills, nearly all writers tried their hand at both forms. Bankimchandra, the incomparable writer of historical novels, also left behind intense, irritated, unfinished fragments on the history and anthropology of Bengalis. R.C. Dutt, the distinguished historian, wrote thinly veiled allegorical novels about Rajputs and Marathas. According to the trend of the times, Bhudev too tried his hand at both,4 with less distinction: his chosen line was different from everyone else's. A true historical sense, he implied, could not be created by piling up factual material about the past, or merely finding convenient points from which to counterfactualize in fiction. History could be brought under cognitive, and then hopefully pragmatic, control only by seeking out deeper lines of design in its apparent chaos, often against its surface trends, by finding the causal context of the present in the past. History meant large historical reflection of this kind: philosophy of history, history brought under control by social theory. How does one find a social theory? It is his answer to this all-important question which sets him apart from his contemporaries and makes him so interesting.
Bhudev proposed a theory.5 The distinction of his theory was that it was utterly different from the scrappy and imitative utilitarianism and positivism so common and fashionable among his generation in Calcutta.6 Social theory, which was synonymous with large-scale historical reflection, was used by Europeans to bring under cognitive and pragmatic control their own and other societies: that was precisely what had to be done by Indians. Writers of Bhudev's generation seemed to him to have entirely misconstrued what this project entailed. It did not enjoin imitative thinking, the painstaking application of principles learnt from Western social theory to the recalcitrant material of Indian history. That was, paradoxically, to miss the point of doing theory. Theorists in Europe did not prove their erudition by applying tenets of Chinese philosophy or even ancient Greek concepts to their own unfolding historical experience. They sought to work out concepts of their own to understand that strange mixture of light and darkness in the history of the age of reason, the mixed record of an epoch constructed in the name of rationality, its successful deliberate acts and unintended consequences. Social theory was not an erudite academic discipline; it was essential for intelligent inhabitation within modernity. Through social theory a society tried to engage in self-reflection, see the present as history, and render clear to itself the meanings of the actions of its own members and of others who constituted their history. This argument required a social theory done through concepts of an indigenous tradition: historical and anthropological reflection about the self and the other, starting with a recognition of the contingency of these concepts themselves. I have labelled this project, which Bhudev outlined with admirable clarity, the idea of a reverse anthropology.
Every writer of this generation chose his own terrain for a personal battle with the West, and his own individual strategy.7 Bhudev undertook the task of producing a rigorous theoretical justification of the principles of his own civilization against the invading forces of rationalist, colonial, Christian arguments, as well as those of indigenist Westernism. But what he defended turned out, on closer inspection, to be an interestingly indeterminate object. I have argued in a study of Bankimchandra that this generation decided quite early that ‘we’ should oppose British rule, but it took them some time to settle down to a common understanding of what this ‘we’ represented.8 Even Bankimchandra had considerable hesitation in choosing his nation, but once his mind was made up he contributed most powerfully to the imagination and symbolization of itself. A more rigorous thinker, Bhudev spent some time on the conceptualization of this self. Instead of naming the nation Bharatvarsha, he used first an entirely neutral and logically formal place term, swadesh, one's own country, or swajati, one's own people. Swadesh and swajati carry the suggestions of indistinguishability and self-evidence implied by most self-terms. A person does not call himself by his name; for himself, he is in a peculiar way, unnameable. Apparently, the same holds for the inhabitants of a culture—it is as unnameable for them as all true selves are.
Early nationalism in India covered this uncertainty (its certainty that there is or should be a nation, but uncertainty about who its members are or would be) by the simple device of assuming an ideal audience, by the pretence that to the people concerned the boundaries of this collective self are self-evidently clear. Bhudev did not take this simple and rhetoric recourse; he entered into a more serious process of defining who one's own people are.
The Bengali term jati, as Partha Chatterjee has argued, is a term of interesting ambiguities.9 It can mean, first, simply a logical class. Of course, it can and did also mean social groups, notably, a caste, and was later extended to mean a nation. In traditional usage, it simply has the close, intimate, but indeterminate meaning of a community (in the ordinary English sense, not the more specialized sense of a gemeinschaft). The use of the term, frequent and inevitable as it is in any discourse of politics, conceals a political indeterminacy at the start of early nationalism. It is a crucial ambiguity about who will constitute this privileged community, its associational principle, its criteria of inclusion. This is obscured by the use of indigenous terms such as swajati or swajatiya, meaning ‘like or of the self’, which resist both naming and analysis. Who are the members of the community? The people of the same group: thus the self is identified by a reference to the group, and the group by the self. But nationalism must get out of the circularity of such an immediate consciousness of a pre-reflexively given self.
Contemporary India, Bhudev begins by asserting, lacks a sense of identity (jatiya bhav). Despite his caution, he uses the fundamental trope of nationalism in this passage by using the verb ‘to lose’ (haraiyacche) to indicate that absence (Mukhopadhyay [1892] 1981: 3). To use a distinction from nyāya logic, it is not a prāgābhāva but a dhvānsābhāva, not the absence of something before it has come into existence, but the absence after it has ceased to exist.10 The fact that we miss it proves that sometime it must have been in hand. No nationalism can easily acknowledge the contingency of its origins, its constructedness. It usually pretends that it emerges teleologically from the mystic inner depths of an immemorial past, imposing on the historical record an aggressive anachronistic organization of memory. To begin this anamnetic exercise, it is imperative to begin by asking what constitutes one's kind (jati)? Who should one consider as of the same kind as oneself, one's swajatiya?
The way Bhudev answers this question implicitly shows his belief regarding the character of the historical process, which is half deliberate at best. Swajatiyata, the matter of belonging to the same community or the same relevant class, is not a matter of intention, governed by principles of inclusion and exclusion, by deliberate, rationalist programmes. It is more like an organic sameness imposed on people living for a long time in the same environment, similar to the process of natural adaptation. Rationalist conceptions of culture are excessively constructivist, implying that single cultures are created by men and can be changed by them. Actually, cultures and languages exist above and beyond not only individual human beings, but also groups and generations, gradually changing, no doubt, through their actions, but by a logic they can hardly understand or direct. Swajatiyata is not an attribute conferred on a people by themselves or by others. It is a quality that comes to subsist in them by virtue of their sharing the same natural and historical world. Remarkably, in Bhudev's thought, the natural and material aspects of life are inextricable from its social ones. As inhabitants of the same natural conditions have similarities, the historical world creates similarity among people—in social or religious conduct, in speech and symbolism, and last, but not least, in material culture. Everyday practices create the most deep-seated similarity among people—the way they build houses, their food, dress, furniture, for these reveal their way of dealing with the material environment around them. When people see others who do similar things in these matters they consider them their swajatiya, i.e. similar to themselves (Mukhopadhyay [1892] 1981: 7). According to Indian logic, similarity is a term with a dual meaning. It can mean that objects A and B are directly similar, placed in a relation of identity or indiscernible resemblance. But even if A and B are not directly similar, they may exhibit a negative similarity. B may not be identical to A, but its difference from A may be negligible compared to its differences with C, D, E, etc. The application of this conception of sādṛśya to Indian society reveals an important fact. Two types of similarity can be found in the Indian social order: the direct similarity among the Hindus, but also a wider circle of negative similarity between them and other religious communities (ibid.) Sharing the same nature and same history has created a quality of samaduhkhasukhatā among them, a commonality of happiness and suffering (ibid.: 10). Colonial ideology in British India denies this samadukhasukhata of people belonging to different religious communities. Are they right, or are non-Hindus swajatiya?
In the conceptual language Bhudev is using here, both natural objects and social beings can be said to have their own swadharma (i.e. the collection of properties or attributes which make them what they are), the basis of their differentiation from other objects in the world. However, unlike natural objects, human beings, because of the gift of volition, can change their selfhood (swabhava). Changing religion is like changing one's social being (swadharma). Apparently, this raises great difficulties in a jatiya bhava common among the Hindus.11
Swajatiyata comes from inhabiting the same history; it is not a matter of formal faith alone. The census declares that one-fifth of Indians are Muslims, but it is characteristic of the census enumeration that its statistics cannot take into account the stratification and historical complexity of identities it counts. It thus tends to deny Indian society a map or taxonomy that denies history. From an external view, Indian Muslims would seem to share beliefs or religious conduct with other Islamic societies. But in fact they have a greater similarity to Hindus than to Muslims elsewhere (ibid.: 12).
Indeed, converts to other religions are tied to Hindus by both types of similarity, direct and negative. Essential properties are originary ones. These people were converted to Islam, and if the prior argument that historical attributes are neither created nor destroyed by intentionality is correct, there would remain indelible vestiges of Hinduism carried over into the practice of their new faith. Indian Muslims are tolerant, despite their religious injunctions. In relation to religion they accept their general neighbourliness with Hindus. Their material practices are in any case indistinct from those of Hindus of the same region. Second, in India religious distinctions have a peculiar way of transformation: what originated as religious distinctions of faith usually get changed into relatively self-regulating castes within the loose structure of Hindu society. Religions profess an ideology of uninfringable distinctions; in practice, however, they enter into unavoidable processes of transaction and exchange. Islam in India is thus quite different from Islam elsewhere, both in doctrine and in internal social practices.
Historically, Muslim rule did not counteract the long-term tendencies of Indian civilization. Actually, Muslim rule furthered the process of unification implicit in earlier history. By creating a stable, centralized empire, by imposing identical laws relating to land and administration, by creating the new common language of Hindustani which was intelligible to all Indians, Muslim rule contributed significantly to the emergence of an inchoate consciousness of community among Indians (ibid.: 14ff). This argument is extended to Christians through an anecdote in which a South Indian Christian tells Bhudev with firm conviction: ‘we are Brahmins by caste and Christian by faith… what we changed was only our religion, not the caste to which we have traditionally belonged’ (ibid.: 19). Also, Christianity represented even less of a threat to swajatiyata on account of a cardinal difference between Islam and Christianity in matters of conversion. After conversion, Islam treated all its adherents as equals; but the more the converted Christians and Anglo-Indians sidled up to the British, the more the latter moved away to keep their distance. The Englishman suffered from a congenital inability to make an apan out of a par (ibid.: 17). By the grace of God, India was saved from colonization by the Portuguese or the French, and the terrible effect of their easy inter-marriage and promiscuity (ibid.: 17). Another distinct segment of the Indian population, the tribals, were also coming into a slow historical subsumption inside the Hindu world. A jatiya bhav was thus already coming into being in India, not through the creation of a common pattern of customs and beliefs (as in the USA) but by a mutual recognition of these contiguous and interplaying identities.
Clearly, this argument invokes a logic of history and appeals to a kind of historical consciousness among Indians. But the difficulty was that Western scholarship seemed to have conclusively proved that Indians, especially Hindus, were notoriously lacking in historical consciousness.
Every society requires a minimal sense of continuity through some form of organization of collective memory. All societies have a sense of their past, but they organize and represent this in varying ways. ‘The style of composition of all literature tends to differ from one people to another’ (ibid.: 20). History thus differs in terms of form. It is insensitivity to other forms of historical perception which often creates the illusion that most societies do not have either the curiosity or the implements necessary for a knowledge of their own past. Ontologically, the past is an inescapable dimension of all societies; ‘history’ is only one of its forms of possible representation. It is only a privileging of history, a local and regional form of social remembrance, into a universal rational norm which makes it appear that other societies suffer from a radical absence. The arrangement of memory in Hindu society is different from the European conventions of history writing; and it is essential to understand its internal principles.
Understanding the past requires an explanatory framework. A chronology, a mere temporal sequence of incidents, hardly merits the title of history. Among the Tatars and the Turanians, we are told, there were well-established traditions of chronicling events; still, these are hardly signs of their possessing historical consciousness. To simply indicate that one event followed another is not to explain why they happened in that order: ‘Chronological sequence is a coarse substitute for causality’ (ibid.: 21). Arabic and Judaic cultures also have such chronicles, but these are governed by the ‘cognitively irresponsible’ doctrine that every event is a direct expression of god's intentions—a doctrine that destroys serious history by absolving the enquirer of the responsibility of explaining anything.
Contrary to Orientalist doctrine, Indian writers have been more perspicuous on this point than other cultures. Causality is a concept that can be read in many ways. A shallow reading simply conceives of cause as the event prior in time. A more complex one would regard it as a configuration of circumstances necessary for the consequent ananyatha siddhi (literally: ‘could not have happened otherwise’, indicating an ‘if’ clause; ibid.: 22). In fact, the second notion subsumes the first by distinguishing between two strands of causal force—first, the peculiar configuration of circumstances left from the past, or the entire gamut of causal pressures stemming from the past whether perceived or not (called the praktana), and second a line of deliberate action directed at this horizon (purushakara), i.e. application of intelligence and force guided by a sense of what is right (dharma sahakrta; ibid.: 22–3). The Hindu construction of the historical is also guided by the distinction, common to all branches of classical philosophy, between actual and real, between factuality and truth, which can often assume a poetic form. The poetic accounts of historical reality and the world are true in this sense: their point is not to give a reliable account of factual sequences, but to present to its readers the essential order of things (ibid.: 23). Tagore gave this distinction a powerful expression in his famous poem on the birth of poetry. To Valmiki, dazzled by the gift of poetry, but unsure about what to write, Narada says, significantly, with a smile:
narad kahila hasi sei satya ja rachibe tumi ghate ja ta sab satya nahe. kabi taba manobhumi ramer janamsthan ayodhyar cheye satya jeno
What you create will be the truth; for all that happens is not what truth is. Poet, know that the land of your mind is truer than the land of Rama's birth, Ayodhya.12
The Puranas, though poetic and fabulous, contain therefore a certain resolution of the people's historical experience.13 As long as these texts survive, they offer the Indian people a representation of their past, a collective memory. To understand any object is to consider its reality or nature, its prakrti. ‘To estimate what an object is likely to be in future, we must judge if what exists is in harmony with the forces of nature. It is nature alone that is permanent. What she favours survives and expands, what she disfavours wanes to eventual destruction’ (ibid.: 16). Thus, it is necessary to analyse the nature of Indian society through an analysis of its historical logic and the intellectual representations of that nature as congealed in self-images.
The essential logic of Indian history, in that sense its reality or its truth, is a trend towards gradual unification of its diverse elements through mutual awareness (ibid.: 29), Muslim conquests in India, despite frictions at the surface of political incidents, actually aided this tendency. Muslim rulers simply carried on this trend through the unintended results of their no doubt more narrowly conceived, selfishly deliberate plans (ibid.: 28). The dominion of the British too, amusingly, has not escaped this cunning of reason peculiar to Indian history. By introducing economic and administrative unification on an unprecedented scale, the British have simply created the preconditions for the emergence of a jatiya bhav. Hindus must swim with this tide of history and not uncomprehendingly oppose British rule. To decide what must be welcomed in the British dominion and what must be opposed, Indians need more explicit, conscious historical self-reflection. Hindu society must act according to its own nature (ibid.: 29). In a world which has moved to self-consciousness, which holds the self up to itself as an object of reflection and analysis, Hindu society must do the same, to come to terms with modernity's imperative of self-reflection. It must make a transition from telling stories about itself to a theory of its social order, from Purana to historical sociology.
The puranic way of self-consciousness, adequate traditionally, is no longer so because the world has changed irreversibly. Bhudev acknowledges that in European ideas there is an inextricable connection between social theory and the anthropological enterprise. Knowledge of the self is possible only through a supplementary, if asymmetric, knowledge of the other. By defining itself dialectically, European knowledge has practically forced other societies to do the same through a similar, if not identical, duality. For Hindu society, too, knowledge of the self is imbricated with knowledge of the other. Unlike more chauvinistic contemporaries, Bhudev considers a theory of European modernity essential for the historical survival of Hinduism. This must be isomorphic with the European anthropological exercise, but essayed from the other side. European social theory emerged through an attempt to think through the travails of modernity, making the modern historical world intelligible by degrees. In doing this, social theory began with concepts of ordinary practical life and refined them into theoretical concepts. Once a theoretical structure emerged through an interconnected pattern of such concepts, it was applied to other societies to understand their difference. This gave Europe not merely knowledge of other social worlds in a manner consonant with its needs, it also gave its notion of the self greater definition. To work with social theory, or historical reflection, means repeating this process. A Hindu social theory must be distilled out of the concepts of traditional philosophy and everyday practical concepts, its structure must be built up. Afterwards, the concepts of this social theory should enable Indians to grasp the truth of European modernity ‘from their side’, with their concepts. The intellectual task was not to master European history through its own concepts of self-reflection, but through ‘ours’. Some truths of a society appear only to the eye of an outsider; Indians must therefore produce a Hindu historical sociology of European modernity, in a strict reversal of the Weberian project, an exact mirror image, with the logical places of the self and the other interchanged. A knowledge of the self is prior to the knowledge of the other; philosophies of history precede the emergence of anthropology. The journey must have three parts: first, a sociology of Hindu India; second, a theory of European modernity; and finally, a consideration of what might emerge through the crossing of these two trajectories in the India of the nineteenth century.
European culture is dominated by evolutionist thinking. But Orientalists forget to apply one of its great criteria to their analysis of India. A primary function of any social order is to ensure its survival, and the durability of its primary social organization. Hindu society shows extraordinary strength in this regard: ‘those ancient Egyptian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek and Roman societies long since passed into oblivion. Hindu society continues unruptured and undestroyed’ (ibid.: 31). What features of the social order ensure this durability?
Commonly, European writers begin their histories with a false-hood—that England conquered India by force of arms. It might be more realistic, Bhudev suggests, to say that the Indian people placed themselves under British dominion (ibid.: 32). By contrast, Muslim rulers had truly conquered India by military force: and this happened because Hindu society had placed military skills in the province of a separate and special caste. Hindu society could do that because it did not consider warfare a particularly significant task which should be practised by all members of society. Historically, whenever Indian society has made common cause, it has succeeded against military attacks, but it does not do so as a rule. This simply reveals a principle of Hindu social ordering—the marginality of the state. Inner governance is what keeps Hindu communities in their proper order, rather than the everyday menace of political power. As the state is not central to its existence, Hindu society can show a certain indifference even at times of great military turmoil. At times of war, when political storms of succession or control tear apart the upper layers of society, the ordinary business of productive work, of agriculture and commerce, can continue in its customary rhythm. There is an imperturbable normality in this society that continues despite wars, conquests, the rise and fall of kings and dynasties. Hindu social organization is peculiarly anti-martial, peaceable, self-ordered. Consequently, it is a society that is easy to conquer but impossible to dominate.
This, surprisingly, inverts the explanation as to why British conquest happened. It is a fact that can be explained by reference to Hindu social principles rather than to the invincible superiority of European arms or rationalist knowledge. Military success, in any case, is hardly an infallible criterion of cultural superiority. Ignorant Spartans inflicted defeat on the highly cultured people of Athens, the barbaric Macedonians on the rest of Greece, wild Tartars on the civilized Chinese, and hordes of German tribesmen on the great Roman empire. ‘Those who lose a war are therefore proved inferior—is a doctrine of the unsubtle, unworthy of men of discernment’ (ibid.: 33).
Hindu society is ruled by dharma; but it is essential to explicate what this means. Religion is not superstitious fancifulness, or even a predominantly moral order; it has fundamentally a cognitive relation with the world: ‘Religious texts are those works which provide answers to questions men cannot refrain from asking about the external world of nature and the inner world of their consciousness’ (ibid.: 36). One of the central questions of this kind, says Bhudev, is ‘why is there so much difference; so much inequality in the world, and why is there so much inequality among men?’ (ibid.: 36). Surprisingly, the Hindu caste order provides a credible answer to this basic puzzle. Hindu seers sought to answer this question by reference to the ubiquitous perception of causality in all intelligible events. Time is divided into its tripartite form in the interest of causal explanation—bhuta, bhavishyat, and vartaman. Any event in the present can be said to have been brought about by causalities lodged in the past, and would similarly produce effect in the future, the parakala. Clearly, there is an asymmetry between the three kalas (times), in that it is only the present which can be clearly seen. There is a haziness that inevitably attends the human picture of the past and the future—though the haziness is due to different reasons in the two cases. The circumstances of individuals are different precisely due to the forces of causation in the past; and in future the present chain of acts would equally have its effects. Hindu religious thought, according to Bhudev, is rooted in this recognition of the ubiquity of causal chains: nothing in our experience is uncaused, not merely in the world of nature, but also in the social condition of human beings. Thus, what a person is undergoing at present must have been caused by previous acts in the past, perhaps a past that stretches beyond this birth into a previous life. For Bhudev, an attraction of this moral belief is that it inspires endeavour and induces discipline. Present suffering is merely the result of past misdeeds, screened off by our birth. Present good conduct, by the same logic, would cause later happiness, even if delayed by a birth or two. ‘A traditional Hindu thus has no cause for dissatisfied agitation. His traditionalism makes him peaceable: for how can one resent the enjoyment of the fruits of one's own acts.’ Since parakala is determined by acts in the ihakala, the present, this also sufficiently excites his endeavour to do good. Indeed, good conduct is in one's own extended interest (ibid.: 36). Bhudev does not analyse Buddhist thought as its principles are basically similar to those of Hinduism.
Christianity arises from a different way of looking at the ontology of the past. It does not acknowledge the praktana, the causal power of the past. Men sometimes confer on the processes of nature their own characteristic of self-conscious activity. In Christianity, this is shown in the parable of creation on the model of bringing things into existence by naming and speech. As they do not believe in the praktana, Christians cannot be peaceable, satisfied, or resigned: ‘Their societies resemble battlefields between the various groups which constitute them’ (ibid.: 38). Christians believe in parakala; but their thinking is affected by the excessive subjectivism of their religion, and what happens then is referred to the arbitrary will of an omnipotent god. Subtly, by interpretation, Bhudev confers on Christianity features reminiscent of Weber's notion of a magical religion; and because of the Hindu dedication to causality he reserves for it the title of a rationalist religiosity, an amazing inversion of the demonstrations of Western Religion-soziologie: ‘Egotism is the most powerful emotion in the minds of ordinary Europeans; no other society is composed of people as immoral, indomitable/ungovernable, irrational and egotistic’ (ibid.: 39). Islam partly resembles Christianity but tempers it by its own distinctive passion for equality: ‘Egalitarianism is an idea with great charm. It is here that the strength of the Islamic religion lies. In the whole world, the Muslim is the only true believer in equality. Equality, consequently, is the primary principle of all Islamic societies’ (ibid.: 41). Evidently, this sociology of religion violates all taxonomies commonly built up by European social theory. It becomes necessary then to submit the principles of European social science to a more general critical examination.
Science enjoys great prestige in European intellectual cultures. European scholars claim to apply scientific principles in their comparative study of societies, ‘But science is not produced by the mere invocation of its name’ (ibid.: 41). Unprincipled and unreal science is, in fact, more dangerous because it enhances the ignorance of the unlearned. European science often suggests correlations between the physical attributes of a country and the social organization of its people—a reference probably to Buckle's theories—‘but European historical science is yet dreaming about such scientificity’ (ibid.: 43). In fact, this kind of tenuous and vulgar natural determinism is shown by Bhudev to have a surface and a deep structure. Only on its surface, or at the level of subjective intentions, does it make an effort towards scientific inference; at a deeper level, it is simply wilfully libellous towards Indian society. To express disbelief in this pseudo-scientific literature is not to disbelieve science or the powers of the causal explanation of social facts; it is merely separating real from fraudulent science. Actually, the science of society has achieved only fragmentary, disjointed, and crude principles of such causal understanding, and in fact Europeans are bringing science itself into disrepute by putting it at the service of their respective national histories and their internal prejudices.
Bhudev's treatise takes up for disproof some common naturalistic hypotheses suggesting the inferiority of Indians. First, he tackles the climatic determinism claiming heat and excessive fertility of the soil as being hindrances to Indian exertion and civilization. Second, he turns towards dietary theories which maintain that rice is insufficiently nutritious and that vegetarianism leads to biological degeneration of the race. To deduce subtle social principles from such general geographical facts is ‘erroneous and laughable’ (ibid.: 46). Interestingly, the only European science that seems more credible to him is racial physiology: that proves for him the fact that Indian society is based on racial divisions, and its interdictions are meant to preserve racial purity.
Historical sociology in Europe is so undeveloped because it depends fatally on analogical reasoning, a simple transference by analogy of ideas from natural to social science. As these ideas are allegorical, such reasoning is slippery and easily swallowed by the unwary. European theorists often see all relations as contractual, including such arrangements as marriage. Some treat the family as the atom of society; others compare the body politic with the body or an organism subject to the cyclical process of birth, youth, decline, and death, with the predictable corollary that European society is seen in a state of youthful vigour whereas other societies are in a state of infancy or decline, requiring European superintendence. It is interesting to note that, unlike most of his contemporaries, Bhudev is simultaneously critical of both the mechanical-atomistic and organicist constructions of society. A careful examination shows both these allegories to be misleading: to try to judge which one is better is a waste of time.
Indeed, if we insist on analogies, Hindu thought offers a superior one: by analogy the body of a society can be compared to a divine body (devasharira): it has no temporal origin or end; as long as it exists, it shows a youthful functionality (gods never age, they are sthirayauvana); and every society has a specific nature according to its historic prime function (ibid.: 50).
The priority of society over the individual is a patent fact to be accepted in any serious reflection about society, but not in the form in which this idea has been cast in European organicism. Hindu thinking analogically puts it into the otherwise inexplicable concept of a daiva rna (a debt to the gods)—a feeling of debt or thankfulness to one's own society which is to be paid back in rituals and good work.14 European writers advance another equally untenable idea through analogical reasoning: a society that has lost political sovereignty is considered destroyed because it will fail to take serious decisions such as those relating to war and peace. Again, this is untrue and it is used in the service of colonial control. The loss of political sovereignty does not indicate the death of a society; and if society survives, the recovery of its political power is always possible.
By assuming that the relation between society and the individual is always antagonistic, European theory falls into overgeneralization, turning a contingent historical principle of European modernity into a universal human requirement. Yet Bhudev recognizes that there should be a distinction between the relation between men, and between societies. Though social solidarity is based on a feeling of community among men, the relation between societies is usually unfriendly, irrespective of their forms. At the heart of the argument lies a strange Hindu Malthusianism. Successful social organization leads to paradoxical and, in some ways, self-defeating results. It leads to an increase in population, resulting in the scarcity of goods; thus, the social principles in all social forms must strike a balance between population and productivity/sustenance. A labour theory of property reduces waste and kindles activity and enterprise. Property rights change historically; there is no form of property that can be considered either universal or natural for mankind, or in all circumstances superior to others (ibid.: 52). Indeed, the evolution of the right to property follows a historical logic. Initially, the right to property rests with the social group, the clan or community, a situation that Europeans often confuse with slavery. Certainly, this creates a condition in which individuals cannot enjoy rights, but it is substantially different from slavery in European history. ‘Uncle Tom is tortured by his masters, the slaves of Asia—Sabaktagin, Qutabuddin, Iltutmish—succeed them to their thrones’ (ibid.: 53). European history gradually evolved into the modern form of property rights, in which private property was the natural form of possession of material goods. Yet this theory is philosophically flawed and inconsistent with its premises. If labour alone is considered the justifiable basis of property, then individual possession becomes wholly untenable. According to this theory, no one can claim any title to literally any property, for each social object involves the complex expenditure of various people's labour. All societies tend to expand at the expense of others, but not with equal aggressiveness. Agrarian and pastoral societies also seek expansion, because they too suffer from their own specific forms of scarcity, but that is fundamentally different from the peculiar aggressiveness of European commercial civilization (ibid.: 60). Bhudev shrewdly discovers a tendency towards an equalization of modernity among the European nations. Consequently, the most likely outcome of national rivalry in Europe was that European nations would maintain a tense peace amongst themselves by devising rules of international law which would keep their internal conflicts under control in Europe, but push these conflicts outside towards the colonial periphery. Europeans would thus enjoy the fruits of an artificial peace, while the rest of the world would have to suffer the unbridled destructiveness of modern warfare, not for any fault of its own. Uncontrollable aggression and the internal disorder of European commercialism would be directed outwards in the form of a militaristic colonialism.
To counteract the historical effects of colonialism does not imply contemplating rebellion against British rule, at least not yet. Colonialism is not merely a structure of economic extraction; it requires as a condition of success a habitual obedience of the colonized to the cognitive forms produced by Western rationalism. Rationalism's central theses about how societies are known are entirely different from earlier thinking. These earlier forms of knowledge assumed that every social form necessarily gave rise to some self-knowledge around a conceptual structure adequate for living within its special intricacies. Outsiders wrote about them as mere spectators or reporters, performing the thankless task of translating, always inadequately, between two internal languages of description, identification, making sense, and making do, which must remain incommensurable to some degree. This was captured in the image of the traveller, with its associations of transience, externality, fallibility, without any claim to a knowledge superior to that of the insiders. Rationalist thought had ended this image of communication between societies and their accounts of themselves. The new theory placed knowledge of societies in a clear hierarchy, internal knowledge being inferior to Western theory analysing other cultures. Of course, the reverse of this did not hold. Pictures of Western societies produced by other cultures were irredeemably false. The internal knowledge of European societies produced by European social theory was adequate for understanding them, but this was not true of the internal knowledge of other cultures. The external knowledge of the West alone was able to reveal their truth. European knowledge about itself (social theory) and the other (anthropology) could be countered only by a strictly symmetrical construction. Hindu society does not have a developed sociology: but that is hardly surprising. Neither had Europe till a hundred years earlier. Social science is an implement for coping with modernity and its strange and unprecedented puzzlements. Although Hindu thought did not have a sociology ready at hand, its concepts could be used to work out a sociology, and then analyse European history through its conceptual grid. This was no less than a project of an anthropology in reverse. Bhudev sets out to capture the essence of Westernness (pashchatya bhav; ibid.: 65 ff.). His enterprise carries the inescapable marks of the immoderateness of the colonial encounter: it speaks with the polite insolence of a high civilization, using a subtle play of indigenous concepts to partly understand, partly misconstrue, and partly denigrate the culture of the other.
The whole of Western civilization is being transformed by a capitalist modernity; but Bhudev's knowledge of history is too profound to allow him to overlook its internal diversities. He recognizes that neither the structure nor the exact sequence of development of modernity is the same in different European societies. But the West, though not homogeneous, comes to be known in India through the instrumentality of British power. The first task, accordingly, is to compare the principles of social organization in India and Britain. In one of his passages this contrast is worked out with great vividness:
The nature of Hindu society is peaceability, of the English an energetic pursuit of material prosperity. Hindu society is primarily agrarian, the English mainly industrial and commercial. Hindu society recognises collective ownership of property, the English has a strong preference for primogeniture and private ownership. In Hindu society early marriage is the rule, in the English relatively late marriage. Hindu society controls itself by internal governance, English society confers sovereignty on the state to keep itself under control. On Indian soil these two societies with different constitutions have come to meet in conflict. The English are energetic, skillful, conceited and grasping/rapacious/greedy. The Hindu is hardworking, peace-loving, obedient, and contented. Considering these attributes, it seems clear that all that the Hindu has to learn from the British is simply his technological virtuosity, nothing more. Indeed, it would be good for him if he were to learn nothing else. (Ibid.: 65)
Thus the two societies are destined for each other in a perverse fashion; for no other society had perfected the principles of altruism as Hindu society had, and no other had refined egotism to the extent the English had. It would have been better if this encounter had changed the British character instead of the Indian (ibid.: 66). Colonialism was gradually imposing the principles of British life on Indian culture. To the educated classes in India, the British had become the measure of all things.
The strange paradox in all this was that while ‘we were, out of our illimitable regard for the British, constantly devising ways for turning our society into a second England, European philosophers were insistently warning us about the fact that Europe is increasingly overwhelmed by discontent, and would very soon perhaps witness terrible social disorder’ (ibid.: 69). To understand why Europe has reached the present state, and which among its principles are applicable to Indian society, we must analyse the complex fact of Westernism (pashchatya bhav) into its constituent elements. Bhudev lists these elements as egotism, evolutionism, egalitarianism, materialism (aihikata), libertarianism/liberalism, scientific culture, and political constitutionalism (ibid.: 70).
All knowledge of the world begins from a sense of the self. Consciousness always implicates a knowledge of the self whose knowledge it is, an awareness that the Hindu shastras referred to as pratibodhaviditatva. But the sense of the non-self is equally natural and primary, and these are inextricable. However, although all knowledge implies knowledge of the self, different cultures construct diverse conceptions of what the self is. Hindus have an exceptionally open conception of the self (swartha) because it is advaitic, i.e. non-dualistic. Hindus acknowledge the eventual impossibility of a distinction between the self and the non-self because of the ubiquitous existence of internal relations. Bhudev admits that there is no single or general ‘European’ theory of the self. Social philosophy in the West is riven by disputes on the most fundamental questions. French theory after Rousseau has taught that human beings ought to live for others (pararthe). English writers usually object that one must live for and love the self even if one has to live for others’ sake. Englishmen are constitutionally selfish (ibid.: 71); but the selfishness of English social thought is covered by a remarkable conceit. The English blithely equate what is good for them with what is good for the world. By contrast, the Hindu is a natural practitioner of hermeneutics, with a natural inclination and ability to sense what is on the other's mind (parachittagnata; ibid.: 73). British social theory is thus wholly opposed to Hindu thought, while German reflection is not; and Bhudev's favourites among German thinkers are Hegel and Schopenhauer.
Indians have a deeply cyclical conception of the movement of the universe; and Bhudev does not miss the connection between political quietism and a metaphysical assurance that everything that has disappeared would return once more, and everything triumphant must suffer decline. Nothing reinforces the European belief in their own superiority more than the idea of evolution in history. ‘The scientific-minded European does not desist from abusing people; he will try to substantiate his epithets by scientific evidence’ (ibid.: 75). Science is engaged in a constant search for more general causal laws, and the subsumption of these into ever larger wholes. Evolutionism, a theory invented to explain facts of animal life, its complexity and differentiation, must, according to this view, be extended to encompass human affairs. However, its extension to human history led to two unwarranted conclusions: (a) that modern men are biologically superior to their ancient ancestors, and (b) Europeans are correspondingly superior to people of other societies. Imperialist expansion simply illustrates the dominion of the fittest.
Bhudev, interestingly, does not attack evolutionary theories in general, only their illegitimate extension to society and historical explanation. Science simply provides explanations of processes, the evidence for which is obtained through observation. ‘Science has nothing to say about improvement or decline. Science says that organisms transform themselves gradually to adapt to their environment. There is nothing in science to claim that this change is by definition development’ (ibid.: 75). Historical evidence about human progress is very mixed and contestable, and always relative to discordant standards of measurement. Political economy, which Bhudev calls ‘the skeletal frame of European social science’ (ibid.: 77), also offers very mixed evidence on the matter of progress. Technological progress is not accompanied by increased contentment in society—the final goal of all social arrangement. Rather, it has led to the threat of the most intense social discontent and disorder. ‘The forces which contribute to the advance of society also contribute, as it were, to its destruction… Thus nowhere do we see rectilinear paths; all paths are circular, turns of the wheel of time’ (ibid.: 78).
The idea of human progress is, however, not rejected as entirely unfounded. To be sustained, it has to be philosophically grounded in a different style. No other part of nature, except man, manifests the crucial attribute of self-consciousness. Due to this capacity of selfreflexion, and recursive consideration of their actions, human beings alone are able to take action directed towards their collective life. Of course, the world of man must be seen as part of the world of nature which is governed by circular patterns, but if there were to be an exception to this rule it is likely to happen in the human world. Human affairs are held together and directed by collective practical ideals. Societies have to be compared, and the proposals of reform of one society in the image of another must be judged by a consideration of the ideals around which social forms are organized. Conservatism means simply considering new proposals for social reform with care, comparing them critically with older forms of social behaviour (ibid.: 80). Replacing everything old in society simply because it is old is no evidence of critical thought. The uncritical acceptance of older ideals is as harmful as obsessive imitativeness of practices that are new. The question is how to compare societies organized on different principles of practical reason and ideals of moral conduct.
In determining the stage of development of societies, the criterion must be more complex than a simple indicator of technical progress. After a long discussion Bhudev concludes that the state of the social order in Europe is one-sided and declining, and that of India is stagnant—thus the choice is much less clear than commonly supposed: ‘Real improvement of society is not caused by mere technical progress, or the capacity to produce cheap goods, or by excessive accumulation of material wealth, by extension of formal political equality, and certainly not by self-glorification’ (ibid.: 82). Religious conceptions of the world can be theoretically divided into two types: naturalistic and mentalist. In naturalistic religions, god is attributeless, in mentalist ones he has attributes. In the first, the path to god lies through knowledge, in the second through devotion. Hinduism and Buddhism are examples of naturalistic religious forms. Islam and Christianity are both idealistic systems. In the first group, salvation depends on the rules of causality applied to the individual's own actions; in the second, it depends wholly on the will of god. In the first, the Almighty is seen as sinless (apapabiddha), eternal and pervasive in all creation; the second type sees him as possessing the qualities of omnipotence, omniscience, and mercifulness. On most other points, too, naturalistic religions are superior on a scale of rationality; idealistic faiths are superior on one count alone: the question of equality (ibid.: 84).
The idea of equality should be handled with great care. There is no equality in nature, in a strict sense. What we encounter are similarities and resemblances; the limited intelligence of man often reads it wrongly as equality, because there is some resemblance between the ideas of equality and resemblance. The idea of equality has undeniably produced some wonderful historical results; and it could be justified, even if it is philosophically flawed, on the ground of its social usefulness. A sense of equality among men restricts arbitrary power and is naturally attractive to the underprivileged. There are, however, serious shortcomings in the ways in which the idea of equality has been outlined by Western social theory and developed by the events of European political history.
However, European declarations of equality should not be taken at face value, argues Bhudev, echoing radical critiques, because the equality that is professed is an equality of opportunity, not of condition. This could be called affording every individual an equal right to be unequal with others. Its actual effects on society have been disastrous. For, while it does not create a real equality of conditions, it irreversibly undermines hierarchies of all kinds, even though some of these are eminently justifiable. European modernity shows a distaste for all hierarchy in the name of a false egalitarianism. It destroys hierarchies of knowledge, skills, morals, status; yet it leaves untouched a new hierarchy, the least defensible, the inequality of wealth. America, with its frenetic and dedicated commercialism, shows the more cultured and aristocratic European societies the image of their common future.
Societies based on cultures of naturalistic religions look at the question of equality in a completely different way. They accept inequality as an ineradicable fact of nature, but seek to ensure that hierarchies are more justifiable than the inequality of wealth. Hierarchy is an internally complex principle; its different forms have a countervailing relationship; and it is not measured or rewarded by material returns. The Manusmrti puts the case in the following manner:
vittam vandhurvayah karma vidya bhavati panchami
etani manyasthanani gariyoryadyaduttaram15
Manu mentions five different criteria for precedence: wealth, family, age, achievement, and knowledge, but takes care to add that these are to be seen as a hierarchical order. Wealth certainly helps people acquire a certain social precedence, but the least considerable of all.
It is commonly believed, Bhudev goes on to argue, that Indian culture is otherworldly, and the Western by contrast attends to the demands of rationality in the affairs of this world. Bhudev accepts this as true, but with an air of deprecation entirely uncharacteristic for his times. Indian shastric thought saw pravrtti and nivrtti as the dual springs of all human acts (ibid.: 90), but this complex theory was gradually simplified into a theory of two paths of life, one of a hedonistic domesticity, the other of a totally distinct path of renunciation. For him, this is a wholly unwelcome development, and it is in the interest of colonial ideology that Western theorists sometimes speak approvingly of the deep immaterialism of Indian culture and the spiritual inclination of the Indian intellect. What were supposed to be two forces in the original theory governing pragmatic acts were transformed into a division between two paths, one of ineffectual holiness and the other of vulgar acquisitiveness without moral control. In fact, all acts are produced by an interplay between pravrtti and nivrtti. Ayana, movement, is despite its apparent simplicity a dual act, consisting of a step forward indicating exertion, and then of resting before the next step can be taken. All activity in life should be seen accordingly as a combination of exerting and pausing, without which there would be loss of internal balance. Of the two, the shastrakaras realized that nivrtti was the weaker instinct, and emphasized it more in their advice on human conduct. However, it is wrong to conclude from this that the primary ideal of Hindu life is renunciation. Even the Kathopanishad, one of its basic texts, says about the relation between the aihika and the paramarthika that they are inextricable—yadeveha tadamutra, yadamutra tadanviha (ibid.: 90). Indeed, for Bhudev, the notion of the paraloukika should be taken to mean, literally, ‘relating to people who come after’, that is, simply as an injunction not to act with a generational selfishness, but to act in a way that does not reduce the chance of happiness of generations still unborn (ibid.: 92). Western theory teaches egotism not only for individuals, but also for generations. Enlightened self-interest implies an understanding of the ways in which the interests of others are inextricably connected with one's own, so that to injure others is really to injure the self. The idea of nondualism teaches that such bhedabuddhi is destructive; and in the calculation of interest even the interests of the future should be taken into account. Utilitarian individualism is hardly a new theory for Indians; its tenets are exactly similar to those of some lokayatika philosophies, and the answers to its aspirations are already contained in advaitism. Contrary to the Western overemphasis on autonomy, it must be seen that all societies are created by the meeting of the forces of autonomy and community. The principal task of political theory is to indicate ways of striking a rational balance between these two.
The difference between European and Indian societies in their basic principles becomes clear from the way the relation between the rulers and the people is arranged.16 Europe has a hierarchical organization of power in which all spheres of social life are brought under the control of a single central organization called the state. Bhudev recognizes that the historical changes in Europe tend towards a decline of absolutism and spread of constitutional principles. He does not favour Indians learning even constitutionalism from Europeans, though in its proper context it is a wholly welcome development. In Indian society the relation between the rulers and the subjects is governed by a different principle. Indian society recognizes what could be called a sociological separation of powers, instead of concentrating all powers in the state and then trying to restrain it by Montesquieuan devices. In India each element of society exercises some power of self-governance, and everyday life is not submitted to the state for either inspection or guidance. Most significantly, the structure of everyday life is not open to the state to alter through legislation. Sovereignty is thus a deeply misleading concept to apply to Indian society: it simply does not recognize a site for this function. The function of creating and maintaining order, centralized into the notion of sovereignty in Europe, is distributed among various elements of the social structure; but that is not to be construed as an absence of something vital which is to be supplied by British rule. Kings had the power to govern individuals, but not to control and through legislation reorder society, the devasharira composed of iha and parakala, i.e. present and future generations, and consequently their power of law-making in the Western sense was strictly limited. The principles of Indian statecraft are not translatable into the Austinian language of sovereignty. Bhudev is, therefore, sceptical about state-centred projects for reforming Indian society.
If one particular force in society comes to acquire excessive dominance, it gives rise to countervailing action. Social theorists in the West sought to curb the excessive powers of absolutism by means of contractarian theories of government. Under this scheme, the power of the ruler was kept in check by the organized power of the people. It is only recently that Europeans have developed a notion of fiduciary power. The Indian social system considered power fiduciary in any case. Each group was confined within its segmental constitution, and these were kept in place by a constitution of society laid down in the religious order. Religious power was always superior to political power in India, while in Europe the power of the clergy was always derived and backed up by the power of the state. This was possible due to some peculiarities of the functionaries who administered the religious order in Indian society.
1. They were grhasthas, and part of ordinary domesticity, not segregated into a separate monastic order.
2. As they did not have a single establishment, they were able to express diversity and grievances.
3. Economically, they did not depend on the ruler's munificence, because their property was beyond despoliation by royal writs.
Finally, Indian society was ordered by internal governance rather than royal power. To refer to Brahmins as a theocracy was, therefore, entirely misleading. With this, Bhudev's rejection of current diffusionist justifications of colonial rule is complete. Some features of European modernity are, on inspection, found undesirable. Others are commendable, but really not new to Indian culture. Some, which are both commendable and new, like scientific reasoning, are not being imparted to Indian society through colonial rule.
Unlike the earlier experience of Muslim rule, British colonialism was a process of immense significance. The rise of Islamic dynasties, despite the extent of their conquests in India, did nothing to alter the basic rules of operation of the Indian social structure. During British colonial rule, these organizing principles gradually came under the dominance of another society (ibid.: 130). It was, therefore, essential to make long-term historical judgements about what this might hold in store for India in future: ‘British dominion over India is an event unparalleled in the history of mankind. Never have so few people from such a small country been able to rule over such a large empire so far away from their home’ (ibid.: 130). But the conflict between India and Britain should not be seen as a record of confrontations between individuals and battles between armies. What was unfolding in India was a contest between two ways of ordering human society.
Of course, history had seen large empires before, but the modern British empire was special in several ways. The Roman and Russian empires were undoubtedly of vast extent, but these were agrarian empires and geographically contiguous (ekachakra); the British empire was a commercial empire and discontinuous (bahuchakra; ibid.: 130). The reason for the British conquest of India was not British power, but their possession of a reason at once more subtle and significant. British dominion lay in the logic of Indian history: it came more out of the inevitable logic of Indian history than of England's expansion. For this strange reason, Bhudev sympathizes with historians like Seeley who claimed that the empire was created in a state of absentmindedness (ibid.: 130). For Bhudev this expresses a vital truth, though in a distorted form. It was the logic of Indian history which chose, out of all the available political actors at the end of Mughal rule, the British as the protagonists best suited to take this logic forward. For him, too, British rule was the unconscious tool of history, but history of a very different tendency. It is now that we are able to understand the import of the earlier quizzical claim that the British did not conquer India, it placed itself in their hands. Indian unity was primarily a cultural idea during the ancient period. Muslim rule introduced significant institutional elements into this cultural process, especially the administrative structures, and the creation of the minimal common language in Hindustani. British rule simply carried forward this logic of unity by creating preconditions for the translation of this cultural unity into a more self-conscious political sense of the self. Indian history could thus be seen as a great narrative of the rising of a culture to self-consciousness.
British rule had created an indestructible and uninterrupted political order, a network of communication which brought different regions into contact. British presence deterred external attacks, and finally provided India with a single centre of governance (ibid.: 132ff.). All these, though introduced by the British, were real preconditions for the emergence of a political identity for India: only colonialism could create the preconditions for nationalism. This, however, did not minimize the basic faults of British rule. First, alien rule could produce only the preconditions, not the identity itself. Second, colonial authorities were trying to impose on Indian society a fundamentally alien logic of political governance. By explicit declaration, the colonial government had assumed all legislative, executive, and judicial powers, a state of things quite unintelligible to Indian people, and therefore unlikely to be workable in the final analysis. The traditional rulers of India had not enjoyed sovereignty in the Western sense of the concept: they had executive powers in full measure, very restricted judicial powers, but no legislative authority in terms of having the capacity to reorder basic social arrangements and relations among groups. Western political life was based on conflict between opposing social forces in a common public realm (ibid.: 136ff.). Traditional India did not have such a common public realm in the strict sense; it contained groups living in their own public arenas, avoiding contact with others rather than settling conflicts by appeal to a common sovereign. It was due to this incomprehension that the political initiatives of colonial authorities had brought forth peculiar and unintended consequences.
What are the lines of historical possibility in such a case? The first is that the British would gradually understand the logic of Indian social form and accept these—which was unlikely: the British only liked others’ lands, not others’ customs (ibid.: 144). The second possibility was the reverse: the British would assimilate Indians entirely and create a new people, as had happened in Latin America. But the history of the US shows why that could not happen—the logic of British imperialism was very different from the Iberian (ibid.: 144–5). Thus, the most likely possibility was that unassimilated Indians and the unmixing British would face each other for quite some time, and we would have to wait and see what might result from this.
In Indian languages it is customary to speak of the past, future, and present in that sequence, which, though apparently counterintuitive, indicates a necessary explanatory order. To decide what one must do in the present one must consider not only the past but also future prospects, because both are in different ways contexts or ingredients for the present (ibid.: 153).
Judging the future course of events has to be done through a somewhat complex procedure, because of the inextricability of the future of two societies in a colonial world. First, the future course of European history has to be analysed, and since Europe controls the colonies, we can then judge how far that course would be able to impose its logic on all the other societies under its control. Western social theories have given rise to conflicting pictures of the future; and in Bhudev's mind there is a close connection between explanatory and normative thinking in these theories. The conceptions of the future in European theory are wholly materialistic and show the usual immodesty of rationalist ideas. Bhudev suggests a different periodization of European history: from early times to the fall of Rome, from the fall of Rome to the French Revolution, and the new age that the Revolution has ushered in (ibid.: 162). Societies, we have been told earlier, have to be judged according to their constitutive social ideals. Premodern societies gave rise to a number of ideals, but these are considered too utopian by present-day writers. After the Revolution new ideologies have arisen which revealed interesting possibilities about future history. Curiously for someone with such pronounced conservative sympathies, Bhudev shows a peculiar admiration for the Revolution: ‘the great lesson of the French Revolution is that societies should be run for enhancing the welfare of their people’ (ibid.: 163). But, like everything in modern Europe, this great principle has been won, not by the power of self-regulating morality, or dharma, but by social conflict. These welcome changes have been brought about by the destructive and malignant force of egalitarianism. Bhudev notes several paradoxes about the revolutionary process: it displays the conceit of a deliberate rational reconstruction of the social order; but the actual progress of the Revolution showed that such rationality was, in fact, impossible. Second, though launched in the name of equality, the Revolution did not end social inequality but only changed it. It replaced the inequality of status with an equally unjust inequality of wealth (ibid.: 163). The society that emerged from it was, therefore, one of extreme contradiction. This was partly because social groups did not enjoy equality. More fundamentally, this society was troubled because there was a contradiction between its formal principles of equality and the actual inequality of the social condition. It led to the illimitable power of men of property and to the grinding poverty of working people. And the peoples of the rest of the world suffered at the hands of this civilization as it was driven to find markets for its products outside because of low demand at home.
It is not surprising, according to Bhudev, that social theorists have suggested the eradication of inequality through socialist projects. His summary of its principles is astonishingly succinct and appropriate: ‘The right to property should be vested in society rather than the individual. If individuals should not own property, let ownership be given to society as a whole. What we all produce should be given to society; which in return should maintain all its members. We should work according to our ability, and enjoy according to our needs’ (ibid.: 164). Indeed, the socialist doctrine appears to him better grounded philosophically than egotistic individualism, which claims that labour is the basis of property. If that premise is strictly applied, nothing can belong to any individual because of the ineradicable sociality of all created things. There is always the implicit existence of others’ labour in one's own (ibid.: 168). Since socialist principles are better grounded than individualist or utilitarian ethics, it is likely that in the immediate future Europe might see the rise of powerful socialist movements. Yet, for outsiders like him, it is meaningless to dispute whether socialism or individualism is the right theory. In fact, it would be idle to seek Europe's future in the deliberate visions of these theoretical systems. True, ideological thinking can influence historical trajectories because they govern the initiatives of people, but the connection between historical paths and social designs is considerably more complex. To express it in more modern terminology, although men with a common ideology may pursue common rational plans, they are rarely able to force history to follow them—if there is any rationality in the historical process that exists over and beyond such collective plans of action. Real progress never takes place through such impulses.17 All that was valuable in an earlier epoch lies sublated in the new truth that emerges; and the new truth does not take part in the earlier contests; it simply gets away from the plane of the earlier conflict. This has the additional advantage, in his view, that no earlier truth is rejected or wasted. The collective history of humanity follows an implicit law of economy; it never wastes any social experience that is really valuable.
This bears a strong resemblance to the Hegelian theory of history, and Bhudev may have been influenced by German idealism; this way of looking at history appeared to Bhudev compatible with his own reading of Hindu thought, for his historical reasoning derived from its basic concepts. Bhudev ends his discussion by deprecating the utopian constructivism of contemporary European social theory; the supposition underlying many modern ideologies that human societies could be shaped like clay on the potter's wheel (ibid.: 166). Rationalism does not understand that societies have no origin; they can be changed, as evidence shows, but only by understanding their logic of construction and development and acting with it.
Colonialism has linked the destiny of India with Europe; it is likely that British administrators will use Indian society as a laboratory for their social theories and models, and treat it precisely as potter's clay. Bhudev did not expect such simplistic reforms to succeed; they would only scratch the outer shell of society. Political power always bore an external relation to social relations in India; and since the state did not create the caste order, it could not destroy it either. The British were unlikely to succeed in their attempt to break down Indian society as Latin American society had been broken. They would, however, try to enhance their control over Indian life by instituting more intricate and intensive economic controls. Already, there were alarming signs of this extension: formerly the British were contented with occupying official positions in the state; in the second half of the nineteenth century they were gradually penetrating the spheres of trade and commerce. As it turned out, Bhudev grossly underestimated the ingenuity of the indigenous business community, who were soon to outclass the British in their application of the Protestant ethic. However, at the time, it must have appeared like a threatening extension of the logic of subjugation from the political to the productive sphere (ibid.: 257).
What was to be done? Bhudev advises a repeat of the classical strategy of Hinduism, a strategy of withdrawal. Social activities and initiatives should be withdrawn from the public realm of the colonial state. Because whatever is rendered public in this sense, immediately becomes amenable to colonial control. Indians should also try to heighten their sense of community, and this incudes a rebuke to Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay for his sharp attack on Indian zamindars.18 This will merely split the ranks of the swajatiya and ‘make the adversary chuckle with pleasure’.
Historically, the great strength of Hindu society had been its principles of internal governance. The present historical task, however, was not the mere survival of Hindu religion but a revitalization of Indian society. Religion has three internal levels: a level of high philosophic doctrine, a level of rules of conduct which introduces moral order in society, and a third level of achara, or everyday rituals and practice (ibid.: 77). Hinduism must generate a self-reflexive theory and seriously reflect on its historical state. The high philosophy of Hinduism was the most exalted in the world and was therefore impossible to undermine, even by British colonialism. Its moral order was organized around the principle of marginalizing the state, and was unlikely to fall under legislative attacks from colonial power. Achara was the least significant part of religious life and could be adjusted to the needs of the times. The main threat to the Hindu order was not from direct missionary attacks on the Hindu faith, but through the gradually spreading effect of English education, a slow nibbling away at the roots of the conceptual structure of traditional society. This was reflected in the gradual decline of the vernacular languages among a people that had lost their religion—a shrewd use of the idea that every language contains within itself a conception of the world (ibid.: 185ff). Conversely, this conception can retreat and take shelter in the recesses of language. Language can be put to various political uses. The obstinate use of vernaculars in internal communication among Indians—either in the regional vernacular or Hindi—could impart a peculiar secrecy to social and political life, and withdraw them from the realm of public law which the colonial administration was seeking to establish. Bhudev suggests a strategy of non-cooperation through language.
Bhudev's work clearly reveals the peculiarity of his own intellect and the climate of his times; but it also displays a limitation of Hindu thought in general, its tendency towards an ineradicable contemplativeness. Its riches are in its intellectual acuity, fashioning a sociology of Hindu society and applying its principles for a sociology of European modernity. Yet Bhudev's pragmatic advice amounted to a passive form of netrpratiksha, waiting for a leader to emerge in the historical process. He had not guessed badly even in this regard. As Raychaudhuri (1988) has suggested, the image of the leader he was waiting for strongly fitted the man who was to emerge in twenty years’ time.
What Bhudev essayed, nothing less than a social theory, was not attempted by anyone after him in quite the same fashion. Later nationalists, who felt the need for a social theory to make sense of their historical world, mostly relied on Western systems with simple adaptations to the climate. Of course, he was not alone in being alone. Suffering from intellectual loneliness appears to be the cross of all thinkers of some originality. The more interesting question is how they inhabit their loneliness—what they attempt and accomplish inside the peculiar privacy afforded them by general disapproval.
By his own declaration, Bhudev was a man of tradition. This is one of the reasons why he is consistently neglected by modernist chroniclers of the nationalist movement who saw a defence of tradition as an unmitigated evil. Bhudev offered to defend the most disreputable aspects of Hindu society, including the caste system (ibid.: 192ff); nor did he conceal his contempt for the imitative, inconsequential, modernism of reformers. He constantly emphasized an idea that is now more easily grasped—that in the inverted world of colonialism, it took more courage and ingenuity to be a conservative than to be a common reformer. It was the conservative who displayed in greater measure what is taken to be the unfailing mark of intellectual radicalism, the courage to think against the grain of history. Against both traditionalists and modernists, Bhudev showed a deep sense of the historicity of traditions, despite their own pretence of immutability. Traditions survive, despite their own delusions, by coming to terms with the unprecedented and surprising in their history. He was advising Hindus to do this with a lucid self-consciousness, not through grudging, surreptitious, unreflected change. It required an agenda of reflexivity—understanding their own history in the past, and the new, external, unwanted, but still unavoidable history in which colonialism has placed them. This rejected traditional forms of traditionalism because they resisted self-analysis, and denigrated as unwelcome any curiosity about the modern history of Europe.
In devising this very innovative traditionalism, Bhudev had to take some unprecedented intellectual steps. Samaj, the concept Bhudev uses so centrally, is a concept of great indeterminacy in traditional thought and social practice. In traditional discourse, a reference to one's samaj would be context dependent and highly variable: it could mean anything from neighbourhood, village, religious group, to caste, sect. Bhudev's theoretical performance, despite its clear intention of offering a defence of Hindu society, must restructure its internal logic of concepts in quite a fundamental fashion. To speak of samaj in the old indeterminate way would have been inadequate for his purposes: through his argument he coined a Bengali equivalent of the abstract modern conception of society, very different, conceptually, from the earlier indeterminate way of thinking of one's community, of one's samaj. His thought is, therefore, as much an extension of Hindu theory towards unaccustomed questions as a subtle violation of its internal order.
In this essay I have analysed only one of Bhudev's texts, Samajik Prabandha, partly because it is the principal site of his social theorizing. But his intellectual portrait cannot be complete without a supplement, a study of his other, more quizzical, work, Swapnalabdha Bharatvarsher Itihas. That text describes a most extraordinary dream, in which the content entirely violates the customary expectations one has of a dream narrative. In a dream of astonishing clarity and consistency, he describes in great, often tiresome, detail the social constitution of India under an imagined un-British rule, twisting the line of Indian history away from what had actually happened. This shows the insistence of his social thinking; even in his dreams he is constantly constructing social and political forms. Of particular interest is the time in which the story unfolds, a dreamtime that is half past, half future, the indescribable time of historical desire. The formal structure, argument, and pretences of that work are entirely different from the one I have analysed here; but it is also an extension of the same enterprise in another style.
Chatterjee, Partha. 1991. ‘Many Uses of Jati’. Paper presented at a seminar on Terms of Political Discourse in India, Bhubaneshwar.
Dattagupta, Bela. 1972. Sociology in India. Calcutta: Centre for Sociological Research.
Kaviraj, Sudipta. 1992. The Imaginary Institution of India. In Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey. Eds. Subaltern Studies VII. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
——. 1998. The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Mukhopadhyay, Bhudev. 1857. Anguriyabinimay.
——. 1876. Pushpanjali.
——. 1895. Swapnalabdha Bharatvarsher Itihas.
——. [1982] 1981. Samajik Prabandha. Ed. Jahnabi Kumar Chakrabarti. Calcutta: Paschimbanga Rajya Pustak Parshad.
Raychaudhuri, Tapan. 1988. Europe Reconsidered. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Thakur, Rabindranath. 1963. Bhasha o Chhanda. In Rabindrarachanabali (Collected Works), Vol. 5. Calcutta: Visvabharati.
First published in Hinduism: Tradition and Reinterpretation, ed. H. Stietencron and V. Dalmia (New Delhi: Sage, 1995).
1 Swapnalabdha means ‘received in a dream’. That text was published in 1895.
2 I have discussed this in Kaviraj 1998: ch. 4.
3 Raychaudhuri 1988 is the first serious full-length study of Bhudev's ideas; and it places his criticism of European society next to Bankimchandra's.
4 Mukhopadhyay 1857, 1876.
5 His social theory is contained in Samajik Prabandha (1892). All references to this text are to the 1981 edition.
6 Dattagupta 1972.
7 See Raychaudhuri 1988 for a detailed discussion.
8 I have discussed this elsewhere: Kaviraj 1992.
9 Chatterjee 1991.
10 Nyaygā logic distinguishes between various types of abhāva (absence/negation): prāgābhāva means the non-existence of an entity before it has come into existence; dhvānsābhāva, the non-existence after it was destroyed; anyonyābhāva, the negation of X in Y, and vice versa; and atyantābhāva, an intrinsic absence.
11 Bhudev complains that British historians are using history to divide Indian communities: ‘Now there is a new and more significant reason for maintaining and intensifying the division between Hindus and Muslims. Many English historians suggest, explicitly at times, through hints at others, that the Muslims perpetrated unspeakable oppression on Hindus when they held political power. Thus, English historians are sowing a seed of deep resentment against Muslims in the minds of Hindus. This kind of resentment against Muslims and the Islamic religion among modern English educated youth—one would not have found half of that in traditional cultivated Brahmins who were often educated in Persian’ (Mukhopadhyay [1892] 1981: 14).
12 Bhasha o Chhanda, in Thakur 1963, 5: 97.
13 Simply because the historical texts of Indians are not composed according to the conventions of Greek or European writing of history, it is not appropriate to assert that Indians have no history. Thus, the idea that the absence of historical texts indicates a lack of national consciousness does not apply to India. There are entirely different kinds of histories of the nature of our society.
14 Bhudev's discussion about the religious relations with the ancestors is similar to some elements of Durkheim's sociology of religion.
15 Mukhopadhyay [1892] 1981: 87, quoting from Manusmrti.
16 The argument about the relation between society and political authority is outlined in Mukhopadhyay [1892] 1981: 119–25.
17 Ibid.: 165. He calls these impulses jhonk.
18 Ibid.: 212. Though Bhudev does not mention any name, it is a reasonable guess that this was a criticism of Bankim's celebrated essay on the condition of the peasantry in Bengal (Bangadesher Krshak).