Chandra Bhan Prasad                                                                                    |   Print |
11.19.2007                                                                                                        |   PDF |

By most accounts, all Indians now regard democracy as the ideal political system for India, but I would like to argue that that consensus is not quite valid, especially when it comes to challenging the caste order.

The large majority of politicians, political theorists as well as the general public often speak of an Indian way of democracy as distinct from Western democracy, but this thinking has an undercurrent of contempt against the entire Western value system.

That ultimately leads us to being, or believing in being, Indian in terms of a collective ethos and value system. We therefore fall into a category that I describe as the Indian Social Order, one that puts us in sharp conflict with not only western democracy, but also with modernity, and finally with capitalism as a social order.

Often, outside our control, our Indian-ness takes us closer to using caste order as a positive point of reference because the Indian Social Order is infused with the spirit of the caste order.

Within ourselves, a fight erupts between caste and modernity, graduating into a conflict between the modern notion of nationhood and the caste order.

This state of consciousness forces us - the mainstream India(n) - to choose caste over the Indian nation if there was a choice to make. However, this part of consciousness remains unstated, officially unclaimed, but erupts through other channels of conflict.

India at this point of history is in a terrible state of self-conflict: its caste order and the Indian 'nation' are at war. India is still undecided as how far to embrace its nationhood. Since the nation is still not the first choice for most people, any thing hurting the caste order is facing resistance - be it capitalism or mechanization.

Capitalism, for example, is not only about monetary transactions and profit; it is also a social order. For the Indian nation, industrialization is a necessity, but it cannot be independent of capitalism, which as a social order has the innate capacity to replace the caste order.

Given its capacity to destroy caste, all symbols of modernity and capitalism are under attack in India. There is a positive side though. The anti-casteism forces are gaining ground and that is why the conflict exists. Earlier, the caste order had a free run, as is exemplified by the case of how the Indian nation has demonized and marginalized Lord Macaulay.

For instance, if one was to ask any mainstream Indian a simple question 'Given a choice between shooting at a portrait of Sir Robert Clive and Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, which would you choose?' the answer is most likely to be the latter.

The question, therefore, arises: Why do mainstream Indians hate Lord Macaulay more than Sir Robert? After all, Sir Robert won an empire for Britain and India became a colony.

In sharp contrast, Lord Macaulay was virtually an Indian nationalist. Deploy all the historians of the world and scan all history pages of India to find out who the first used the word 'independence' for India.

It would be, on the most selfish view of the case, far better for us that the people of India were well governed and independent of us, than ill governed and subject to us; that they were ruled by their own kings, but wearing our broadcloth, and working with our cutlery, than that they were performing their salams to English collectors and English magistrates, but were too ignorant to value, or too poor to buy, English manufactures. To trade with civilised men is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages.

 

Those are the exact words spoken by Lord Macaulay in his Government of India Speech on July 10, 1833 in the British House of Commons.

Who was the first person to find native Indians worth holding public offices under British rule?

 

We are told that the time can never come when the natives of India can be admitted to high civil and military office. We are told that this is the condition on which we hold our power. We are told that we are bound to confer on our subjects every benefit - which they are capable of enjoying? No; which it is in our power to confer on them? No; but which we can confer on them without hazard to the perpetuity of our own domination. Against that proposition I solemnly protest as inconsistent alike with sound policy and sound morality.

Lord Macaulay again, in the same speech.

If reason was to regulate conscience, India should have accorded honorary citizenship to Lord Macaulay posthumously. Instead, we pull out Lord Macaulay’s Minutes on Education to show that he was a mind-enslaver."...Thomas Babington Macaulay, the founder of the colonial system of training loyal local clerks," wrote the fairly talented Indian traditionalist Praful Bidwai in a December 2006 column in the Khaleej Times.

And let’s look at what are children taught in India’s schools.

"We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect," Macaulay is quoted as by eminent historian Prof. Bipan Chandra for a nationally standardized (by NCERT) history textbook for schools.

What are college and university students taught in India? Here is what Prof. Sumit Sarkar quotes Macaulay as saying in his Modern India: "English educated intelligentsia - brown in colour but white in thought and taste."

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Chandra Bhan Prasad is a visiting scholar for the fall semester 2007 at the Center for the Advanced Study of India. He is one of India’s leading Dalit thinkers and the only Dalit to have a weekly column in a national English daily newspaper, The Pioneer.