Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Ever met an Indian?
|
Is there any such thing as an Indian identity? Professor T.K. Oommen shares his thoughts with ANJANA RAJAN
|
Often people say, for example, I am an Indian first and a Maharashtrian second. In my view this is wrong
FROM THE TRIBE OF THINKERS Professor T.K. Oommen at the India International Centre in New Delhi Photo: V.V. Krishnan
As some of India savours the nuclear deal and George W. Bush's delight at the red carpet rolled out for him, another part of India seethes. Which is the real India, we tend to wonder, whenever we venture to look beyond our nose. Whenever we don't, which is often enough, considering the numbing effect of urban life - one mad whirl to earn a living - we are content to live in our separate Indias. Ever so often the differing realities surface for a head-on clash. The result is crisis, contention, and plenty of evil-doers to fish in the troubled brew. But this is neither a new nor a sporadic phenomenon. In fact it could be said to be the underlying reality of contemporary India, a reality that has its roots in history.
If history is yesterday's present, and today will be history soon enough, no wonder some questions never seem to go away. That's why the Sage publication "Crisis and Contention in Indian Society" by T.K. Oommen is a book of great relevance to India today. Professor Oommen, who retired from Jawaharlal Nehru University's Centre for the Study of Social Systems in 2002, has put together the book as a series of essays, many of which were originally delivered as lectures.
"The book has a dual audience. One is of course my fellow tribal people, the social scientists," he says with a smile. But accompanying the quip is a clarification that shows his serious concern for liberal discourse rather than compartmentalisation. He uses the term social scientist and not sociologist, he explains, since the range of discussion is wider than to be confined to sociology alone.
`Hot topics'
"And it also addressed to the concerned citizen, because many things I am discussing are not only meant for the classroom but for public discussion. Whether it is the unfortunate events that took place in Gujarat in 2002 or the two (political) sore thumbs, the Northeast and Kashmir, these are all hot topics."
Another topic that gets debated mostly in intellectual discourses but whose symptoms are apparent in the recurring social and communal tensions that assail Indian democracy is the issue of citizenship education, which to be solved, requires the notion of the Indian nation to be defined first.
"Often people say, for example, I am an Indian first and a Maharashtrian second. In my view this is wrong," says the professor, who, among other positions, holds the Chair of the Schumacher Centre. The context of being a citizen of India as a political entity is entirely different from that of the cultural identity of a region with its language and other elements of life. "To subordinate one to the other is wrong."
So much for the views of the cultural pluralists, who are often championed as the saviours of India's multi-cultural experience. Because, points out Oommen, both the pluralists and those he terms as "cultural monists" consider India as a nation state, which he feels it is not and cannot aspire to be. India is a multi-cultural state, he insists, and for the concept of citizenship with its rights and duties to find a healthy definition to be passed on to our children, the varied cultural identities should not be abandoned.
Its two major elements are religion and language. Even if Hinduism is the religion of 82 per cent of the population, the remaining 18 per cent constitute 180 million people, larger than the population of many countries. How can you steamroll them, he asks. Similarly, though Hindi is spoken by 40 per cent of the people, it remains a minority language, even if a significant one. "So you can't impose it except by force. And the minute you use force, the Indian experiment fails." The academic therefore is all for the three-language formula, under which a child learns in the mother tongue in the early years of education, then goes on to learn English as well as a third Indian language. "The reality is that religion displaces whereas language accretes."
National state
To take his own example this Kerala-born gentleman received all his early education through Malayalam medium. He heard his first lecture in English only when he reached High School, but that never stopped him from becoming fluent in English, with the ability to research and discourse at a high level in the language, he recalls.
What then is the future of India as a State? The concept of India as a nation State is untenable, he declares, because such a concept is "incessantly in search of cultural homogenisation." Instead, India should be a "national State" that accepts its diversity.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
|
