The United States does not look well. For some time now, every news story coming from America has looked like the latest in a series of painful convulsions. The United Kingdom seems to be in a similar state. In both countries, everyone seems to be fighting everyone else on everything from public healthcare and housing to whether men who identify as women should be allowed to use public restrooms meant exclusively (so far at least) for the biologically female. These questions are creating seemingly impassable fault lines in American and British society.
Douglas Murray has recently observed that, perhaps for the first time, a large section of American society believes that America’s foundations are deeply racist and unjust, and that the country must start over:
A portion of the American people still revere their history, the Founding Fathers, the constitution, flag, anthem and much more. They see them as symbols of a glorious past, a country which has fought for its own and others’ liberty, and the once admired idea of American exceptionalism.
Another portion believe that America is exceptional only in being exceptionally bad … they see the whole American experiment as unusually unfair and uncommonly unequal.
What is unusual, and odd and unhealthy, is for a large portion of a country to only have one set of ideas about their country’s past, and for all of those ideas to be negative. [emphasis mine]
The pattern that Murray points out is also present in another, very different place—India. Much like the US, India is being ravaged by a massive culture war. And much like their counterparts in the US, one half of the warring parties have only one set of ideas about the country’s history—a negative one.
Far from being unusual, though, this sentiment is mainstream. India’s backwardness and immorality, its cruel, casteist, inegalitarian society is taught to Indian children at primary school. Aspirants to India’s coveted civil services (the large, creaky bureaucracy India was handed down by the British) are regularly asked to write essays on a social evil in Indian society as part of an examination that selects the future bureaucrats who will man the levers of India’s vast state machinery. A pervasively negative view of India’s past has hitherto been a prerequisite for any view on India, from the inside or outside.
A large section of the Indian population believe that their country is fundamentally unjust and immoral. The more radical conclude that India must be undone and remade. In retaliation, another significant section insist that India is the greatest, most egalitarian and most scientific of cultures. This side’s radicals have set out to prove this and, in the process, might irreparably damage what is great about India in the first place.
The two groups are tearing the country apart, as they have for centuries. India’s culture war is, in large part, an outcome of colonialism and British rule.
So can the Indian experience be of relevance to the US? Can it provide insight into what happens to a country after centuries of being torn apart by groups that hate and love it, both with the same short-sighted singlemindedness?
India’s long culture wars have eroded Indian society’s mechanisms of conflict resolution and peaceful coexistence. The Indian traditions, which have allowed us to learn from one another, reach remarkable insights about human beings and build mechanisms that teach us how to live happily, have repeatedly come under assault. Groups that seek to fix the many wrongs they see have repeatedly demanded that Indian traditions identify and prove their core doctrines and dogmas and expunge everything that other people have labelled superstitious, misogynistic or casteist. Meanwhile, on the other side of the temple gates, Indian traditions are being hollowed out from the inside, having been repeatedly used to achieve political or ideological ends that have nothing to do with attaining knowledge or happiness.
The result is a nation deeply wounded, unsure of who it is and what it has to give to the world. But a small but growing third section is emerging within Indian society. They reject both alternatives: that India is a debased, immoral culture and that it is the greatest, most advanced culture in the world. Instead, they are grappling with the vital, fundamental questions, that, as S. N. Balagangadhara has argued, Indians will need to address in order to break free from the stranglehold of western ways of speaking, thinking and being. We will have to ask, what does it mean to be Indian? What does it mean to be a non-western culture? What does it mean to have been colonised? What does it mean to have no religion, but innumerable traditions? What does it mean to live together peacefully, notwithstanding India’s diversity? In their search for answers to these questions, this third section of Indian society might put an end to the country’s long culture war.
Meanwhile, we must ask ourselves, how do large sections of any society come to have pervasively negative ideas about their country? What factors influence the self-perception of a society? And what do we do if those perceptions are distorted? In order to put an end to culture wars, we’re going to have to figure out why we all seem to either be embroiled in or hurtling towards them.
12 comments
Very well written and well thought. Cultural war is bound to happen. Much is dependent on how we present our history and traditions to our next gen. Given the multi-dimensions of our culture, it will be unfair to compare with other countries.
Okay, that’s a valid point, but I’d ask this: what is a “Western” or “Indian” way of thinking or being to begin with? Or, more to the point: I think we can agree that the Indian identity was forged in the crucible of anticolonial resistance against the British Raj; and that the preceding Hindu identity was forged primarily in and around the Maratha Empire, in a struggle against the Mughal Empire. Go back beyond that, and you definitely see nothing resembling unity. In other words, it seems to me that the only way to not be defined in Western (or generally foreign-origin) categories is to not hold on to the “Indian” category either. But beyond that lies the abyss of ethnic and religious tensions.
More broadly, here are three legitimate paradigms for thinking about subcontinent history. Either India is: (i) a unified entity deeply riven throughout history by tensions and oppressions of any number of kinds; or (ii) a collection of different groups that have been alternately conflicting and cooperating with each other throughout their shared history; or, (iii) a more or less irrational grouping of actions by different individual actors. If you choose (i), you keep Indian identity with all its cultural wars. If you choose (ii), you open up a civil war – like situation for capturing Indian identity. If you choose (iii), you lose Indian identity altogether. I don’t really see a clear fourth option.
Hi Rishabh, there is indeed an Indian way of thinking or being. That this is the case is evident in almost all aspects of life. To touch on only one, foreign organisations often have enormous problems setting up operations or commercial enterprises in India. So far people have attributed these problems to Indians’ dishonesty, corruption, lack of professionalism, hierarchal power structures, and other such easy but unhelpful explanations. Research on the matter is beginning to get a preliminary insights into what the cultural differences could be between businesses in India and the West, for instance. See: https://cutt.ly/jhFGOET and https://cutt.ly/shFG1eb. So yes, there is an Indian way of being. What exactly it is, and how it is different from, say, a Western way of being is the subject of research and is beginning to show very intriguing, illuminating results. See: https://cutt.ly/4hFHlAH
Re (i), (ii), and (iii) – these are true for almost every region/country in the world. Even if these were true exclusively for India, why would the second set of (i), (ii), and (iii) follow from this?
As a non-Indian I have often wondered whether any of the strife is related to the fact that India has multiple languages, each spoken by millions of people. Are any of the differences due to the inability of Indians to understand one another, or are English and Hindi broadly enough spoken/read for this not to be a problem?
Hi Marian, no, language is not the issue. Hindi and English are spoken broadly enough and most Indians are multilingual and also speak regional languages and/or local dialects.
Very powerful views combined with flair for writing.looking forward to more articles from you🌸🌺❤️
For non-Indian )e.g., American, British, Canadian, or Australian) readers, the article might have been a little more helpful if the writer had included a brief outline of some of the specific areas or topics of current Indian cultural conflicts–e.g., just exactly what particular issues are Indians currently so bitterly polarized over the way that Americans are currently polarized over abortion, gay marriage, transgender rights, evolution versus Creationism, gun rights, immigration, “Black Lives Matter,” “defund the police,” and Muslims, or the way that Israelis are polarized over Palestinians and over secularism versus “haredi” Orthodox Judaism?
Thats a good point. The controversy over entry for all women to Sabarimala temple in Kerala, the deep divide over caste-related legislation across India, controversy over conversion and anti-conversion laws, and state control over temples, are a few examples. In most of these issues, something peculiar is happening. In the Sabarimala issue, for instance, it may seem obvious at first that all women should be allowed entry to any and all temples . The Sabarimala case, however, shows why something like that is not obvious to the many many Indians opposing entry of all women into the temple. Here’s a great piece arguing from the latter perspective: https://bit.ly/375d3du. In the Sabarimala case, and in the case of India’s culture war in general, several conflicts are not about particular principles, but are in fact a clash of two groups talking about two completely different things not visible/intelligible to the opposite party.
Very well written
Very nice
A very balanced analysis as she has not fallen prey to Left Leaning Politically Correct winds blowing in the prominent universities in the ‘ First World” or a irrational Right Wing Chest Thumpers. She has shown deep understanding of the realities of India and the cultural conflicts elsewhere.