It will perhaps be wrong to suggest that the participants in the five-day seminar organised by the Indian Institute of Advanced Study at Simla last week represented what might loosely be called the country’s intellectual community. The economists were, for instance, conspicuous by their absence. Considering the choice of the subject – alternative futures: the framework of values – persons specialising in sociology, philosophy, literature and the arts naturally influenced the course of the discussions. Be that as it may, the seminar brought out certain trends in thinking which are clearly disturbing even if these are not wholly representative of the views of the larger academic community.
The dominant feeling that emerged at the seminar was one of aversion to science and technology. There were, of course, voices of protest against this atavistic throwback to the past. A bio-physicist, an engineer and a professor of political science, for example, repeatedly pointed out not only that India could not do without science and technology but also that it was possible now to fashion highly sophisticated technology to meet the needs of villages. But their voices were quickly drowned in the general anti-technology sentiment.
AWARENESS
Apparently many participants in the seminar had been deeply influenced by the debate that has been touched off in the West by the sudden public awareness that the earth’s non-renewable resources are limited and face exhaustion in the foreseeable future, even if their consumption continues at the present rate, and that the growth of pollution threatens to overwhelm our planet and degrade the quality of life to a dangerous and unacceptable level. But instead of arguing, as is being done in the West, that it is necessary to develop alternative sources of power and take all possible measures to cope with the twin problems of shortages of resources and pollution, they tended to take the view that mankind could meet the gravest crisis in its history only by coming to terms with nature, that is by giving up the extravagant ambition of subordinating nature to its purpose.
There has been a revival of interest in Gandhism here as a result of the activities of the Club of Rome and the disenchantment among certain sections of young people in the West with material affluence and its social consequences. The renewed appeal of Gandhism has come to reinforce the bias against modem technology which is to a certain extent unavoidable in a society caught in the painful and unsettling process of change.
The seminar highlighted another interesting point which is that Western-type liberalism, with its emphasis on the primacy of the individual and its opposition to the ever-increasing intrusion of the state in the life of society, is tending to become an ally of Gandhism.
The concept of individualism was doubtless anathema to the Mahatma. Indeed, his virulent denunciation of the Western civilisation was a result as much of his abhorrence of industrialisation as of his attachment to traditional values which underscore the primacy of society over the individual. But the advocates of neither Gandhism nor of the concept of the sanctity of the individual at Simla paid the least attention either to this or to the other equally vital fact that individualism is a product of the renaissance and the industrial revolution both of which were concerned about the phenomenal increase in the powers of the modern state. This was not all. For, even some radicals were prepared to accept Gandhism on the idea that it shared many features with Maoism if only the latter was shorn of its emphasis on the gun being the arbiter of human destiny.
Curiously enough, in the discussion on Gandhism there was hardly a reference to the fact that pre-industrial societies were full of inequalities in India and elsewhere, that hundreds of millions of people in this country live in such abysmal conditions that it is absurd to talk of defending their individuality and personality against the evils of industrialisation, that the population explosion since the death of the Mahatma has changed the very magnitude of the problem in that it is just not possible today even to feed the people through traditional agriculture, and that the modernisation of agriculture itself is dependent on the establishment of industries to produce inputs like fertilisers, insecticides and tools of different kinds and the availability of power to energise tube-wells.
EMPHATIC
There were only a couple of participants in the seminar who spoke emphatically of the liberating role of industrialisation and pointed out that tribal societies, which could not be idolised, conformed in many ways to a communitarian outlook. By implication they suggested that India would meet the same fate as different tribes within the country and elsewhere if, like them, it, too, failed to innovate. But they got short shrift from the other participants.
It was not surprising after this if some participants wondered whether the source of much of the trouble was not the proverbial lack of the historical approach among Indian academics. Otherwise, how account for the fact that most of the speakers at the seminar tended to discuss concepts, Gandhian as well as others, as if they were sui generis, had nothing to do with times in which they had risen and prospered and could be implemented irrespective of the prevalent socio-economic conditions?
The seminar helped to bring out two other aspects of Indian intellectual life which are far from reassuring. First, it showed that Indian academics are not able to discuss their heritage critically enough. Many of even those among them who are averse to the caste system and the inequities it seeks to perpetuate are more than willing to believe that there is a timeless quality about the values espoused in the past.
At a time when many of the traditional practices like untouchability and the giving and acceptance of dowry have lost respectability among the intellectual elite, the supposed efficacy of different yogic techniques is helping to sustain faith in the continuing validity of traditional values. This is surprising because these days yogic techniques themselves are being recommended as value-free physical and mental exercises.
Similarly, it is almost universally accepted that the Hindus have possessed a remarkable capacity for synthesising various cultures, with the result that hardly anyone is willing to examine the proposition that they only allow different concepts and cultures to co-exist side by side without ever attempting to integrate them. In plain terms, the impulse to question the past, which contact with Christianity and Western liberal education promoted in the late 18th and the early 19th century, appears to have been exhausted.
LIMITED
Secondly, the seminar showed that the number of Indians who have engaged in a comparative study of different religions and societies is rather limited. For instance, many participants seemed to believe that the cyclic view of life is peculiar to the Hindus and that this view does not provide for progress, linear or multi-linear. The fact is that the Greeks, too, took a cyclic view of life.
Many of the concepts like the timelessness and unique nature of Indian values and the supposedly pessimistic view of life which we now expound were of course popularised by Western scholars at one time. But they did so at a time when comparative religion, anthropology and sociology were infant disciplines. We cannot therefore blame them. We have to own the responsibility for accepting a distorted and unhelpful view of ourselves.
All this is neither to suggest that the seminar was not stimulating nor to cast doubt on the quality of academic life in the country but to point out the pitfalls of a non-historical and doctrinaire approach and the lack of a proper appreciation of the dynamics of Western societies. The highly industrialised societies have doubtless entered a difficult period. But they are by no means facing entropy. We can only harm ourselves if we come to believe either that they are exhausted or that science and technology can be dispensed with in our search for a more prosperous and just society.
The Times of India, 24 June 1976