CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY
Squaring India's circles
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`Varma's larger generalisations will raise hackles ... and some of his empirical examples do not quite work.'
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PAVAN VARMA'S argument is that the many contradictions of Indian life are the key to this very complex society and its tangles and stalemates.
Varma takes the defining areas to be power, wealth, technology, and (sic) pan-Indianness. The manifestation and use of power, he says, are looked for by the Indian public; even if Pandit Nehru and President Rajendra Prasad felt a twinge of guilt at moving into the palatial residences previously occupied by the Viceroy and the colonial commander-in-chief, Varma says "the average Indian" would have disapproved if the two leaders had not made much of their power. It follows that India's meticulously-stratified society gives a "particularly Indian colouring to the meaning and operation of modern concepts like democracy and equality." The historical roots of this, according to Varma, lie in Kautilya's Arthashastra, which on Varma's reading puts the possession and use of power above any ethical questions. Therefore, corruption is a very Indian thing, a way of achieving an end.
As to wealth, anything goes, provided we make money: it is a "universal Indian trait" that we pursue material benefit in the "most adverse and improbable situations". For Varma, we simply have to do so; only three per cent of Indians work in the so-called organised economy, and hundreds of millions therefore have to improvise, reuse, and redeploy, anything and everything that comes into their orbit, from clothes to lassi-makers made from old washing machines. To this ingenuity is added what Varma considers a naturally Indian talent for mercantile organisation. His examples, from the Kaira cooperatives through Lijjat Papads and SEWA to the hi-tech giants, are impressive. Varma sees the contradiction here as lying between the often ruthless and exploitative pursuit of money and our indifference to squalor and suffering. His explanation is that the manifest depth and importance of spirituality and religious observances, which look like an evasion of temporal problems, are essential for sheer survival in face of the enormous obstacles in all areas of Indian life.
Indian technology, Varma says, is also very Indian. Varma quotes a comment that Indians think inductively, not deductively, and he cites mathematicians and IT professionals who assert that Indians have a natural talent for mathematics. The problems behind the success of Indians in mathematics and related fields have, Varma contends, to do with the fact that these are not areas of work where we get our hands dirty, or not physically anyway. Neither are we good at innovation in these areas, because innovation often requires changes in working practices, thereby undermining India's occupationally-based social hierarchies. Even staff in explicitly less-hierarchical organisations follow tradition rigidly outside work, including giving and taking dowries. The owners are the same; Indian industry accounts for only 15 per cent of India's spending on research and development, and a number of Indians have become innovators only after they have started working abroad.
Varma's chapter on pan-Indianness is what he would probably call a very Indian mélange. Yes, we are enormously diverse, but we are united by the film industry, by the similarity in off-the-peg clothes we wear, and by our resilience in the face of constant problems and burdens in everyday life. Yet we are contradictory here too, being notably welcoming towards foreigners and often calculatingly vicious towards millions of our fellow-citizens.
Varma's conclusion reads like a civil servant's multi-pronged strategy to address our problems. He advocates the free market, though he does not examine what the free market might mean in this severely stratified society; he is apparently unaware that the trickle-down theory of wealth has been severely criticised on conceptual and empirical grounds. Neither too, is he aware that several major aid donors are now turning back to the state as the most powerful and effective agent of delivery.
Further, Varma's larger generalisations will raise hackles (the equation of India with Hinduism, although professedly not communalist, is one such), and some of his empirical examples do not quite work. Varma criticises modern Indian officials for undermining elected representatives where their colonially-trained predecessors did not do so, but seems not to be aware of the documented undermining by British mandarins of major policies of Harold Wilson's government in the 1960s. In addition, Varma's comment that democracy in the United States is well-entrenched is at best contentious; barely 50% turn out to vote in Presidential elections, electoral registration procedures are often labyrinthine or worse, and Article 2 Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution says nothing about any popular vote for the President, stating only that the President shall be elected by an electoral college and specifying the relevant procedures.
There are conceptual problems too. First, Varma's explicit disavowal of theory is untenable. For example, his explanation of the sheer need for entrepreneurial imagination among the poor is conventionally Marxist in form. Secondly, Varma's other arguments seem to take no account of other possibilities; for example, the avoidance of research and development in Indian industry could well be a result of shareholder pressure for quick profits (a noted problem in the U.K. too). Thirdly, Varma seems to see several practices, such as servility, corruption as a means to an end, adherence to tradition as a response to the multiple problems of Indian life, and so on, as functional and necessary for stability; this echoes Talcott Parsons and his unacknowledged conservatism. A fourth problem is that Varma advocates strategies for reform and improvement; this could well contradict both his principle that we must not derive an ought from an is (itself an issue in the philosophy of logic) and his general argument that we just are a contradictory people.
Those, however, are perhaps rather severe criticisms to make of an author who has set out to be accessible to the general reader. And if India's various circles remain unsquared, Varma has shown how much squaring them will involve.
Being Indian, Pavan K. Varma, Viking Penguin, 2004, hardback, p.325, Rs. 325.
Arvind Sivaramakrishnan is lecturer in politics and law at Taunton's College, Southampton, U.K.
ARVIND SIVARAMAKRISHNAN
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