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1a.VR Mehta - intro - notes
Indian Political Thought-II (6.2)
University of Delhi
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
i
Politics is an activity between human beings by which diverse and conflicting claims of various wholes in a polity are conciliated, redi¬ rected and, at times, reorganized for the welfare of all. The need for such reconciliation arises because, as the ancients thought, the more powerful wholes are apt to transgress into the spheres of the less powerful and the right is often identified with the interest of the strong. Although there is politics in all wholes and structural arrangements of society, in family, village and industry, the one whole in which political activity is pre¬ eminent in relation to community is the State for in it alone politics acquires unique importance: it seeks to mediate between order, change and history. Each conciliation, reconciliation and reorganization may not be final but so long as it endures it secures some order by means of which men relate to each other in society; when this order is lacking life cannot go on smoothly. The role of political activity can indeed be compared to the activity of the stomach in the human body, which is to reconcile the demands and needs of different organs of the body and to supervise productive and distributive activities in accordance with general rules of hygiene. Political activity is a managerial activity of this sort which seeks to organize and conciliate different interests, claims and demands of the various wholes in society by supervising its productive and distributive apparatus. It is, therefore, natural that people must have thought about and debated issues pertaining to it right from the beginning of conscious existence on this planet. There was Chinese political thought, Greek political thought and Roman political thought. We speak of modern Western political thought. Likewise Indians also developed their own kind of political thought which in due course acquired its own identity. When we emphasize the separate identity of Indian society or traditions
FOUNDATIONS OF INDIAN POLITICAL THOUGHT of thought in India, we do not mean that Indian society exists or has existed in isolation from other societies. Indeed, in diverse ways the growth and development of Indian society, as well as its decay, have been shaped by outside influences which have come to us from time to time. We can mention the influence of earlier prehistoric civilizations such as the Egyptian, the Persian, the Chinese with all of which there is a close resemblance. Then came the Greeks, various tribes, people from Persia, Iran and other Arabic countries which brought with them the richness of their culture, and finally the Western culture which has enriched the ever flowing stream of national consciousness in so many ways. In certain cases, the influence was decisive in giving a new direction to the alredy existing thought. But pervasive influence from outside does not mean the non existance of our own personality. Each society has a personality of its own. It can develop only when it accepts those influences which suit its requirement at a particular point of time and which it is in a position to assimilate. When the external influences become overpowering, or the body is not able to assimilate them, certain tensions are generated which in due course lead to its decay. The subject of the interaction of outside influences with the total personality of the society and various traditions within it can be a fascinating subject of study. This interaction helps each society to be conscious of its distinct personality, gives a new meaning to its own civilizational experience, and suggests various ways and means, options and choices by which the society can cope with its own problems. The study of western political thought is therefore important not only because in a certain measure it is already part of our total personality but also because its very creativity suggests ways and options open to us after a century of give and take. What is, however, unfortunate is the little attention being paid in university courses to the development of social and political thought in india. Our students know more about Rome and England than about their own country with the result that they remain largely ignorant about their own traditions of thought. This is re¬ sponsible for much of the alienation of the Indian intellectual from his own society. It would be worthwhile here to ponder a little more deeply in order to identify the distinct features of the Indian civilization, particularly in terms of political thought. Such distinctness comes to light only at the deepest level and not on a superficial appraisal. The peculiar situation of India which makes it a neat geographical unit as well as the socio¬ religious structure in the country have provided a certain stamp of unity. This unity is to be found at the deepest level in the social and philosophi-
4 FOUNDATIONS OF INDIAN POLITICAL THOUGHT Islamic religious traditions are undoubtedly the most significant later developments of this assimilation. We are emphasizing this in order to question the commonly held view that there is no continuity in the development of Indian thought. Indeed, one can confidently assert that there is a remarkable continuity in the development of ideas about action, duty, caste, cosmic process and even justice and the state. Then there are breaks as when Islam entered India or Christian and Western cultures came in. But in these periods also, there was an attempt to combine the earlier ideas with Islam, an effort to tide over the gaps so that the old thread was recovered, resurrected or reinterpreted in a new form. In the medieval period, there was a lull in Hindu political thought but some of the ideas were absorbed by people like Abul Fazal. In another sense, there was an effort to preserve the dominant tradition through such epics as Tulsidas’ Ramchar- itmanas. We do not propose to gloss over the fact that there was very little political speculation in the medieval period. In this sense there was of course a break in continuity. While the civilization continued, politics assumed different forms; in the medieval period politics actually broke down and then resumed with a different flavour. But this did not long endure and with the advent of the Europeans, particularly the British a new political idiom emerged and took hold of the minds of the people. However, if we do not take into account the rich contribution of Islamic law and world view, their ideas about justice and equality which entered in legal and various other institutions, reinforced by the adoption of Urdu and Persian as court languages, we shall not be able to properly under¬ stand the modern Indian psyche. It is true that Islamic political thought rested mainly on Greek and Persian antecedents. But in another sense, though this has yet to be established, the traditional Indian ideas about social order, justice, kinship, equality which might have profoundly in¬ fluenced Greek thought of Hesiod, Plato and Aristotle, came back home, albeit in a new form, via Persia, through Islam, for there was a close re¬ semblance between these ideas and Barni’s ideas on these topics, not¬ withstanding his contempt for Hindus, on traditional notions of good and evil, and the need for moderation and justice in a well governed state. In any case, when the modern Renaissance began in the nineteenth century, there was a Herculean effort to recover the spirit of the ancients, to combine it with that of the medieval, and to integrate both to suit the needs of the moderns. The Renaissance reformers and thinkers looked back at the past, identified what was living and dead in Indian tradition. 1 There was a remarkable revival of the ancient thought. Their debates are
INTRODUCTION intelligible only in terms of the historical context of an ancient society awakening itself to new light and glory in a colonial situation. This was true of Aurobindo, Gandhi, Ranade and Tilak right down to the present time. It must be confessed that the continuity of the socio-religious tradition is quite in contrast to the breaks in political traditions, 2 where there are tensions, short cuts, regressions as well as jumps. The founda¬ tional experience received a severe setback first with the advent of Islam and then with the introduction of English education in the nineteenth century. The adoption of the Westminster model with its justificatory liberal theory was yet another departure from existing thought and practice. It is from this angle that one can say that tension between society and politics is one of the unresolved problems facing us even today. It is as a result of so many ups and down, twists and turns that we cannot share the western notion of history as progress. In our case it has been a cyclical, almost a zigzag movement in which earlier insights are given up under pressure of a new wave of thought and reintroduced and reinter¬ preted at a subsequent moment to accommodate yet another set of changes which have come upon society. This has made the development of the Indian personality a far more complicated process than in the West where one can legitimately speak of progress through the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the industrial revolution to the present space age. This complexity becomes all the more glaring when one is told of manu¬ scripts lost or still untranslated, making one wonder whether these manuscripts had any importance, and if so why they were lost or con¬ demned to oblivion. Obviously if they were important once and then lost, one may be inclined to think there were breaks in the development which made them irrelevant or unsafe. Recently there has once again been talk of the absence of unity in this tradition, or traditions, in India, thus discrediting the view of continuity in or cohesiveness of a social centre in society such as emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. But on the whole Indian society has upto the time of Gandhi, worked and operated with a conviction of such a continuity. In other words, we have always taken India to be a case of unity in diversity. 3 Throughout our history we have constantly referred to the past writers, habitually quoting or citing Manu, Valmiki or Vyasa, as though these people shared the same idiom of thought. Even Abul Fazal undertook the translation of the Mahabharata. The influence of earlier ideas is writ large in his writings. Similarly, writers like Aruobindo and Gandhi constantly referred to the past view;
INTRODUCTION 7 of a particular time. This philosophical position is right in so far as it insists on the importance of context, but it ignores the fact that the history of ideas in due course acquires its own autonomy and whatever the language or words or historical context, certain ideas or concepts are common to all mankind. They persist across time. Otherwise Plato’s Republic, Kautilya’s Arthasastra would be simply incommunicable to us. The dilemma which haunted Arjun on the battle-field still confronts us. We are able to appreciate and sympathize with it. And it is this which explains the enduring influence of these classics and provides a legiti¬ macy to all attempts to seek permanence amidst change and flux. It is one thing to emphasize the importance of context and another to make the context absolute at the expense of the text. The context is important because it helps us in two ways. First, it throws a new light on some hidden meaning in the book which would not otherwise be revealed. Secondly, it is important insofar as it emphasizes the totality of social process in which the world is integrally related to consciousness as a part of this process. Political thought cannot be divorced from political experience. Therefore it is incumbent on us to understand the context of ideas and issues in their age if we wish to properly appreciate Aristotle or Kautilya. They were debating issues which were important to their contemporaries. In that sense they were addressing particular audiences of their time. To this extent the totality of historical process provided the background to their political thought. It would, for example, make no sense to argue about imperial administration before Kautilya or about liberal democracy before the modern experience. The emphasis on the context of the historical process must make us very careful in our evaluation of historical personages. Rana Pratap and Shivaji appear as reactionaries from the point of view of the present but in the context in which they were placed, their struggles had a definite significance. Context has two aspects. First comes objective and subjective ap¬ paratus and second, the intellectual history of the society. We must reiterate that while the objective and subjective factors condition men they do not determine all that they do. Though human life may not provide much choice, man has a certain autonomy and responsibility for conscious actions. Political thinkers like individuals are moral beings in sofar as they make conscious decisions and are responsible for these decisions. They cannot be condoned on the pretext that they thought in a particular way because of the compulsions of the situation in which they were placed. Rules and institutions of society may be laid down but human beings are endowed with the capacity for making conscious
8 FOUNDATIONS OF INDIAN POLITICAL THOUGHT choices, either of conforming to these rules or changing them. The historical process has its own flow but individuals have the capacity to give it new direction. The individual may not always succeed. There may be, as the ancients believed, an element of rita or inexorable destiny or conspiracy of circumstances. Every writer or thinker grapples with this to find out where changes or jumps are possible. In that sense while every man is a creature of his age, he is also a creator. There are so many instances of people who were weak in their personal life yet became most powerful and positive leaders, heroes or philosophers. There is a need to explain the reasons for this incongruity in their lives. The context may help us to find out why a particular philosopher said a particular thing. The value of his personal or historical experience is limited by the fact that he tries to transcend the immediate experience in terms of search for permanence. The greater his effort to transcend the immediate in order to change,revitalize or reshape, it, 5 the greater is his stature as a man or a thinker. This is what is meant by a great thinker or hero. Both often appear irrelevant to their contemporaries. A great thinker is indeed one who transcends the immediate constraints to create something which connects him to the past, the present and the future. Of course, even here there are limits beyond which a thinker cannot go if he wants to be understood or appreciated. That is why we have Don Quixotes too. But between these two points of immediate environment and historical sweep, there are many options and choices available to thinkers in terms of which they can communicate their message. The cherished ideals of truth, justice, freedom, equality may vary from society to society but there is hardly a society which would deny the importance of these ideals, specially the importance of speaking the truth. Certainly some ideas are more important in one tradition than in another and authors must be related to this distinctness in their traditions, but the greater the attempt one makes to transcend the boundaries of one’s tradition and formulate a universal discourse, the more enduring is one’s stature as a thinker. That is why, as we have already said, Plato or Kautilya still make sense to us. Moreover, a purely historical approach will make us antiquarians rather than political theorists. As political theorists we are interested in the past in so far as it illumines our own situation and predicament, gives us new insights into the human situation or throws new light on its constituents. After all, the vision of a right order or dharma or of a good person such as Rama has provided meaning and substance to the developments of our national ethos. These visions grew in a particular historical setting constituted by both the material situation and the
10 FOUNDATIONS OF INDIAN POLITICAL THOUGHT that West today existed in ancient India, and the other is equally vehement in its debt to the West. Then there are liberal historians, Marxist historians and the supporters of orthodoxy. In part, the fault lies with the manuscripts as they exist today. They have been subjected to almost genetic mutations from time to time to suit the interests of a particular class or age. The result is that the profound and the banal are so inextricably mixed that it becomes a difficult task disentangling them. However, it is our belief that while these classics bristle with inconsis¬ tencies and incoherencies, there is a philosophical core which can be disentangled once we take into account their linkage with the general development of philosophical and religious thought. Similarly, each classic has a certain historical sequence of events within it which may not be authentic from the view of exact dates but may nonetheless provide us with sufficient insight to reconstruct the context in which these classics were written. From the Western experience we know that there is certain correspondence between development in the field of ideas and concepts on die one hand and society on the other. Individualism gives rise to one kind of society, collectivism to another. In some cases changes in ideas precede social changes, in other situations social changes precede changes in ideas. Advances in mathematics are reflected not only in changes in physical sciences and technology but also in philosophy and vice versa. Indian society too must have gone through a process in which changes took place in conjunction or concert with each other and not in isolation. A certain level of technology must give rise to a certain philosophical system and vice versa. When we refer to the Western process we do not mean that Indian society passed through exactly the same stages. This would be too simplistic a picture of a process which has been far more complex. But study of the process in the West can certainly illuminate the linkages which might have existed between politics, society, economy and philosophy in the past. It is our belief that once these linkages become clear a certain story of the evolution of ideas in India with all its continuities and discontinuities, begins to appear. And it shall be our endeavour to pursue the course of this story as revealed by history, myths, legends and symbols. NOTES
- See, V. Mehta, Ideology, Modernization and Politics in India (New Delhi, Ma- nohar, 1983).
- Ibid.
INTRODUCTION 3. Ibid. 4. See Q. Skinner “Meaning and understanding in the History of Ideas”, History and Theory, VIII, No, 1. 1969, pp. 3-53. Also B. Prakash and R. Berki, “The History of Political Ideas: A Critique of Q. Skinner’s Methology”, Journal of History of Ideas, 34,1973,163-84. Q. Skinner, “Some Problems in the Analysis of Thought and Action”, Political Theory, 2, No. 3, August 1974, pp. 277-303. Richard Ashcraft, “On the problem of Methodology and the Nature of Political Theory'”, Political Theory, 3, February 1975. Michael Oakcsholl, Introduction to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, (Oxford, Black- wekk, 1957). 5.
1a.VR Mehta - intro - notes
Course: Indian Political Thought-II (6.2)
University: University of Delhi
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