Freedom and Dissent – Our Traditions

In freedom and dissent and passion for learning and other areas where Indian universities should take special pride they have become most vulnerable. A Tradition which nourished a spirit of inquiry is now seen to be particularly vulnerable. The sages of the Upanishads dared to ask the sun himself to take off his disc because the Paurusha behind him was the same as the one within them. They made fun of the gods of the Vedas and their watch words were Neti, not this, not this, and ‘Charaiveti’, ‘march on, march on, o ye traveller’. Even princes in palaces were devoted to the adventure of the mind. Such was young Siddhartha who wandered for years to find an answer to the human condition. Think of a monk like Sankara who before he was 32 went on foot to the four corners of India and established cultural centres. Another, whose every word ‘dripped with energy’, as Jawaharlal Nehru said of Vivekananda, ‘thundered’ across the American continent and at home told the orthodox Mylapore Brahmins of Madras who accused him of being a meat-eating monk, “Is God such a nervous fool that the river of His mercy will be dammed by a piece of meat? If such be he, He isn’t worth a farthing”. As for him, he could understand the Gita better through his biceps! How blasphemous it must have sounded to the missionaries! He wouldn’t dismiss reason in matters of religion, for, if reason could be our guide in selling and buying, he couldn’t see how he could do without it in profound areas like religion and God! And that is how Gandhi could affirm that Jawaharlal Nehru, for all his incessant celebration of the scientific attitude, was more religious and nearer to God than most others who claimed to be religious. With a tradition which 2000 years ago invited the Charvakas (Materialists) to preach godlessness form the precincts of our temples, how can the scientist of today pooh pooh Professor Seshadri’s persuasive essay on ‘Religion and Science’ or subscribe to the ill-informed Western view of Jagadish Chandra Bose as a ‘Hindu Occultist’?

Consider how most of us parrot Westerned accusations hurled at us in the thoughtless phrases: ‘lack of a sense of history’, ‘the vision of Evil’ or ‘moral values’, ‘suppression of the individual’ ‘of woman’ etc. The terms have to be taken out of the Eurocentric context, for even a fact of history has to be mythologised in the Indian context before it clan come home to our people. Such is our strong penchant for the metaphysical (it is seen, that even Western historians-­Toynbee and Plumb in England, and Turner in the United States, among them talk of the ‘pattern of history’ and the ‘cyclical view of history’ and ‘historical reality’) that dates and facts are less important than the pattern they fall into and assume the power of a myth or an archetype in the collective unconscious of the people. Our tradition does not use the categories of Good and Evil, but rather of vidya and avidya, knowledge and ignorance. It is time we realised the inherent contradiction of Christian societies in which on the one hand, knowledge is a ‘forbidden fruit’ and on the other, a western science prides itself on its relentless pursuit of knowledge, while it fights shy of adventure just when it calls for penetration of areas which are beyond the realm of empricism. And physical science’s timidity became psychology’s opportunity’. The new science has stolen a march over the physical in many disciplines, chiefly medicine and neuro sciences, besides, for the Indian, knowledge is that by which all else is known. Narada comes to Sanatkumara in the Upahishads to know the nature of the highest knowledge because all the art and the sciences had not given him the happiness he was seeking. Not for nothing did Ramanujam declare that even mathematical equations had no meaning for him unless they put in him thoughts of God, God being a popular term for the Supreme Principle which governs all Life and keeps the planets in their orbits.

Now, Evil, an Indian would say, is relative and arises from one’s lack of knowledge. Hence our time-bound curses on those who make a departure from the shared norms of society and thus disturb the equilibrium so that they may gather knowledge the hard way through suffering. Even the demons were all worshippers of Siva and pitted against God while striving to reach Him sooner than His friends. (The myth of Jaya Viyaya and Hiranyaksha informs that they preferred to reach God taking three births as adversaries rather than wait for seven births and reach Him as Friends!)

As for the individual, scientists should know that the triumph of bio-sciences today is the phenomenon of the gene which makes for continuity of the group, community or race. The west has paid the price for its tragic assertion of the self since the Renaissance. Its rebels are neurotic outlaws, not the self-sacrificing princes, heroes and saints of the Indian Society. Be a hero or a saint: ‘when half-gods go, the gods arrive’!

Well, Ideas do not originate in our universities. We are in most at the receiving end, even in such live disciplines as social sciences, agriculture and medicine. I recall with distress a syllabus presented to the Academic Council for a post-graduate diploma in Social Work. It was lifted wholesale from an outdated American University calendar. And this when the structure of our society is different, our modes of living and our values are different; our rituals, festivals, superstitions, our approach to marriages, women, widows, children, servants, neighbours, are all different. How can we send a student brought up on the American syllabus to do social work in our slums without a profound awareness of their problems and what gives meaning to their life? For, if they are impoverished economically, they are nevertheless rich in an organic culture that has given them meaning. Western economists have been amused that our planners know their London school of Economics and Harvard better than the grass roots of their own economy. The university man, in a vast majority of cases is singularly unaware of this tradition and misses the benefits of the spirit of adventure which characterised his ancestors. No, not ancestors, but of his contemporaries too who in industry, business, and even agriculture have to a large extent recovered the old spirit and helped to place India among the developed countries of the world.

It is ironic that universities which should be shining examples of the spirit of inquiry should be lagging behind so deplorably. This, despite the most impressive achievement of Indian intelligence in Science and Technology, recognized in laudatory remarks like the one by the internationally known Professor of Physics at Yale who thought that a thesis he adjudicated from Madras University in late fifties was worth four Ph.D.s from Yale! This does not mitigate, though the virgin ignorance on the part of a young second class M.A. from one of our universities, of the name of Sankara while a French visitor like Malraux thought his chief business in India was to have a conversation with Sankara!

Consequently a German scholar like Max Muller has the distinction of reconstructing our Vedas, a Warren Hastings in introducing the Gita, a Ryder translating Kalidasa, a Heinrich Zimmer commenting on the myths and legends H.H. Wilson, Monier Williams, Havell and Marshell doing the rest. It is not Cambridge’s honour that it discovered Ramanujam as Boston, Chicago and Texas did in according recognition to Ananda Coomaraswamy, Chandrashekar and Raja Rao without ‘required qualification’. Manu, Panini and Nagarjuna have to be commended to us by the West. If bad currency drives out the good our universities have much to answer, much to ponder. A Texan professor writing a book on T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets rejected much Indian criticism on the poem as ‘carbon copies’ of Mathhiessen and Balckmur, for what he wished to know was the Indian view of the concepts of Action and Time, both centrally enacted in the quartets, precisely what the Indian scholars had not touched on! And yet the Gita abounds with the concept of Time, and Nagarjuna could make Heraclitus pale into the ground on Time and Flux.

The desperate need of the hour is first to prove our identity as Indian people and relate our pursuits, especially on the intellectual plane, to the growth of this society and the issues facing it. And stop collecting rags and bones, as Tagore so long ago warned, at others’ dust-bins.

The young American who came to learn Sanskrit at Benaras Hindu University was not too harsh when he wrote in The Times of India ‘My India died 1500 years ago’ and so asked his countrymen ‘If you want to learn Sanskrit, don’t come to India, better go to Harvard or Heidelberg. ‘It is sad that a country whose universities of Kasi, Nalanda and Taxila which once drew advanced scholars from all Asia before the Christian era should have thrown away such a heritage after sustaining it for a thousand years, for Benaras continued to attract eminent newest thinkers in those days of hazardous travel to test their newest theories and passionate claims against those of their rivals. We have today a multiplicity of universities with more than a million students and a vast task force of teachers, with degrees and memberships of learned bodies, enough to make simultaneous equation in algebra; the dominant desire of the best of them is to seek recognition and material rewards in places of dubious merit and worse, collect testimonials, not give them.