The anxiety of influence

To truly have a mind of our own, we must draw from both foreign influences and the past

There is a great current of anxiety over just how foreign ideas are influencing India. Often this can express itself in pathological forms, whether in the suspicion in some sections of the Left of everything that has an American provenance, or in the overblown anxieties of the Right about the contamination of Indian culture. But it would be a mistake to use these expressions of anxiety over foreign influences to altogether dismiss the question of how exactly we handle these influences. There are some legitimate questions that practices of the Indian public sphere raise. Why is it that the government consistently thinks Indian institutions cannot do a decent enough job of re-training Indian civil servants? Why should we be paying huge overheads to universities like Syracuse, Duke or Harvard for experiences that have more brand value than substantive logic? Why is it that Indian newspapers, rather than producing more knowledge about the world, and shaping global debates, are content to simply carry discourses produced elsewhere? Even the intellectually deadend controversy over foreign coaches in cricket had half a point: is it that we don’t have indigenous talent, or do we have a real problem in accepting the authority of our compatriots?

Nirmal Verma made a distinction that should be the starting point for any sensible reflection on this subject. The real question is not what has influenced a writer, what multiplicity of sources go into the construction of his world. The real issue is whether the writer has been able to handle them with self possession. A similar thought underlies Gandhi’s statement to the effect that he wanted the winds of many lands to blow, but he also did not want to be swept away by any. What is the point of freedom if you cannot make a whole range of sources and experiences your own? Therefore the question of “foreign influences” is misplaced. The question is why do we think we do not have the self possession to handle them?

First, there is the sheer institutional context. We are in this vicious circle where government has, by regulation or politics, run down the capacities of most Indian institutions. So Harvard and Duke will be given budgetary and other freedoms few Indian institutions can even dream of. The PM rightly bemoans the lack of long term perspective in Indian institutions and think-tanks. But instead of addressing this problem, we have chosen the easy path of living off borrowed brand names. The arid wasteland of so many Indian institutions is bound to generate a crisis of self confidence, and its corrosive effects are being felt in many fields: from foreign policy to economic policy.

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It is said, rightly, that there is so much innovation happening in Indian industry that any talk of a crisis of confidence is misplaced. But this observation can also be turned on its head. As India rises as a global economic and political power, the question of our own perspective on the world becomes more not less important. Who are we? What do we stand for? What form of social self knowledge do we produce? These questions have a pressing urgency and the resources to answer them will not come from a few R&D labs in the private sector. There is one sense in which the generation of our founding fathers was more decolonised than we are. This was not in the narrow sense in which our traditionalists interpret it, as resisting foreign influence. They were more decolonised in terms of their intellectual ambition. This ambition was not simply to strategically manoeuvre India in a world whose terms are set by someone else. It was rather to develop alternative perspectives on the world and create alternative universalities. Some of the ideas were crazy, some floundered on impracticality, but they at least wrestled with issues that were important. One of the paradoxes of the Indian intellectual experience is that no matter which field you look at — from law to history or even Sanskrit scholarship — the quality of Indian output during the first half of the 20th century far surpasses anything we currently produce. It is as if our rising status is diminishing both our intellectual ambition and self confidence. Small wonder that any discussion about India’s identity quickly degenerates into a contest between two contrasting images: on the one hand, a nativist India trying to keep the foreign out; on the other, India as sponge, indiscriminatingly absorbing anything that flows its way.

The mistake Indian liberals are making is in assuming that economic reform will itself create a more properly liberal culture. As Nirmal Verma pointed out with prescience, a purely instrumental orientation to the world carries with it its own dangers. It creates a vacuum on matters of culture that reactionary forces find easy to fill. A truly enlarged identity draws not just from foreign countries, but from that most foreign of countries: the past. It is not a coincidence that the high tide of European and American liberalism was also accompanied by an acute engagement with and creative re-articulation of tradition. It is naive to suppose that we can create a confident conversation about the kind of nation we want to be, what our identities are, what ground we stand on, under conditions of intellectual amnesia. Both the Left and Right are afflicted by amnesia: the one simply erases the past as obscurantism; the other collapses it into a shibboleth called tradition. Since neither have meaningful ways to talk about how we got to the state we are, they declaim most loudly about foreign influences. But the cultural work of overcoming an instrumentalism about society and an amnesia about the past, still remains to be done.

Don’t be surprised if the anxiety of influence rears its ugly head in our politics. But it would be a mistake to think that its source is simply the paranoia of a few. It is an inevitable product of a nation whose sense of self importance is not matched by a correspondingly searching conversation over what it stands for. It is easier to face the blowing winds when you are confident that you know what ground you stand on.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research