The Idea of India

168 Pages·2012·1.8 MB·English

by  Sunil Khilnani

SUNIL KHILNANI
The Idea of India
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Introduction to the 2012 Edition
Introduction to the 2003 Edition
Preface
Map: The British Empire in India Before 1947
Map: India in 1997
INTRODUCTION: IDEAS OF INDIA
ONE: DEMOCRACY
TWO: TEMPLES OF THE FUTURE
THREE: CITIES
FOUR: WHO IS AN INDIAN?
EPILOGUE: THE GARB OF MODERNITY
References
Bibliographical Essay
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sunil Khilnani is Director of the King’s India Institute and holder of the Avantha Chair at King’s
College London. Born in Delhi and educated at Trinity Hall and King’s College, Cambridge, he was
formerly founder and Director of South Asia Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of
Advanced International Studies in Washington DC. In addition to his critically acclaimed bestseller
The Idea of India, he is author of Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France and
co-editor of Civil Society: History and Possibilities. A columnist and frequent contributor to the
Indian and international press, he and his wife, the writer Katherine Boo, divide their time between
London, the US and India.
It is that market, of considerable attraction to international capital, which is today India’s greatest
comparative advantage – and one that makes it a potential engine of the global economy.
SANJAY SARABHAI
In Memory
and for KATHERINE
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE IDEA OF INDIA
‘Khilnani’s disquisitions on India’s democracy, economy, cities and identity are enthralling for their combination of scholarly
background, muscular argument and compelling prose … If you were to choose one original work of non-fiction … on India, I
would unhesitatingly recommend Khilnani’s’
Sunil Sethi, Financial Times
‘Brilliantly perceptive … Khilnani’s book is written with verve and its clear arguments are plausible and stimulating … it can be
read with pleasure and profit even by those who have little knowledge of Indian politics’
Gordon Johnson, The Times Higher Education Supplement
‘Khilnani writes with illuminating dexterity, wit and compassion, and India springs to life through his words … the book is a
skilfully woven and compassionate analysis of India’s troubled passages to modernity’
Judith Brown, The New York Times Book Review
‘An eloquent, persuasive argument for Nehru’s improvised, permeable sense of nationhood. If India loses this identity, it will be
a much less attractive place to the outsider and, more importantly, to many of the people who live in it. Khilnani is
dispassionate, scholarly, never sentimental. There is a crisp wit to his sentences and he is frank about his country’s
failings … Brilliant’
Ian Jack, Observer
‘A stimulating, subtle and wide-ranging work, which offers a sophisticated but convincing analysis of the way in which the
country has developed during the last half-century … the most interesting study of modern India that I have read for years’
Patrick French, Literary Review
‘Of all the books that could have been written with this title, this must be the most important and down to earth … Authoritative
and elegantly written, Khilnani’s book throws up some large ideas’
Sunday Times
‘A masterful historical analysis of democracy in India since the achievement of Independence’
Patrick Skene Catling, Irish Times
‘Compelling … Not only a must read, but, with its sheer stylistic flamboyance, it can easily be categorized as unputdownable. It
should be recommended reading not only for students of history and political science, but for all those who want to make sense
of the current churning process’
Chandan Mitra, Pioneer
‘A brilliantly compressed but elegant essay on the ideology, politics and culture of India after 1947. Khilnani has achieved the
impossible task of writing something that speaks both to the experts in the field, and to complete novices’
Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year
‘How are India’s successes and failures related, and how can they be explained? Sunil Khilnani’s elegant and well-argued
book addresses these and related questions … with erudition and insight’
Bhikhu Parekh, Independent
‘No book has illuminated so clearly the assumptions on which India was first founded or the logic by which its history
subsequently proceeded’
Michael Kerrigan, Scotsman
Introduction
To the 2012 Edition
Why India? Why, of all post-colonial nations, is India the country that gets taken most seriously by the
very powers it once struggled against? Whether it’s corporate Britain wooing Indian money by
throwing Bollywood bling parties at London’s Claridge’s Hotel or European luxury houses like
Hermès launching special sari lines for India’s glamouratti or President Obama choosing the Indian
Prime Minister as the guest of honour for his first state banquet – the world wants a piece of India.
Not since nineteenth-century America has an ex-colony moved so fast into prominence on the
international stage.
Plenty of people have answers that purport to explain this phenomenon – India’s scale, its software
and smartness, its strategic location. But I think the real answer is more subtle and more obvious. It
has to do with the fact that India is still here – that, unlike many new states created after the end of
European empire, it has not self-destructed. What if India’s current prominence has more to do with
what it has avoided, steered around, than with what it has done?
When I wrote The Idea of India in 1997, I wanted to show that the founding idea of India is
anchored as much in resisting certain powerful seductions – the temptations for a clear, singular
definition of nationhood, for the apparent neatness of authoritarian politics, for the clarities of a statist
or pure market economy, for unambiguous alliances with other states – as it was in realizing
declaratory visions.
History moves fast these days – faster that it did when nineteenth-century America began its climb to
world power, faster than when Gandhi and Nehru brought India to Independence in the mid-twentieth
century, and faster still than in the years since I wrote this book. In India, what were once gradual
changes – the upswing of economic growth, the movement of Indians from the countryside to the city,
the sabotage of the old hierarchies of the social order, the renegotiation of India’s place and status in
the world – now turn at dizzying pace.
Such historical fast-tracking has taken India to a point where it is now possible to envisage a real
change in the chronic conditions of deprivation and injustice that have so long entrapped most
Indians. Actually altering those conditions for the better will, however, require a run of political
judgement and action as momentous as that accomplished by India’s founders in the mid-twentieth
century, when that remarkable generation broke India free from an authoritarian, oppressive past and
set it forth in pursuit of liberty and democracy.
The grand tasks of the years ahead are daunting: managing the largest-ever rural-to-urban transition
under democratic conditions; developing the human capital and sustaining the ecological and energy
resources needed for participatory economic growth; contending with powerful competitor states and
containing a volatile neighbourhood; defining what sort of power we wish to be in the world. It’s an
agenda that would test any society at the best of times. But in India’s case, these tasks will have to be
achieved under severe constraints of time and choice.
Ours is a society of swiftly inflating expectations, where old deference crumbles before youthful
impatience. And internationally, India must navigate a fluid arena: one where global power is
rearranging itself in as yet undefined ways, where capital is restless, and where new, unforeseen
threats and risks are facts of life. India will have only a sliver of time, a matter of years, in which to
seize its chances. After all, the faster history moves, the more likely is one to get left behind.
The policy choices we make over the coming decade – about education, about environmental
resources, about social and fiscal responsibility, about foreign affairs –will propel us down tracks
that will be difficult to renounce or even revise in years to come. The aptness of those choices will
depend not on entrepreneurial brilliance or technological prowess, or the cheapness of its labour, but
on politics. Yet, at this historical moment when emergent possibilities and new problems are
crowding in, the transformative momentum of India’s politics seems to have dissipated.
Although the founders saw political freedom as their great goal, decades on, what that freedom has
delivered measures up poorly for many. For India’s business leaders eager to compete with China,
for the middle classes who are fed up by corruption, for radicalisant intellectuals, for desperate
citizens who have taken up arms against the state, democracy in India is a story of deflating illusions,
of obstacles and oppression. Democratic politics itself is seen as impeding the decisive action
needed to expand economic possibilities.
It’s a troubling irony: political imagination, judgement, and action – the capacities that first brought
India it into existence – seem to have deserted both the air-conditioned hallways of power as well as
the dusty streets of protest, just when India needs them. The distinctive source of modern India’s
legitimacy has, to many, become an agent of the country’s ills.
India’s democratic discontent echoes a wider disaffection. Across the globe, democratic politics is
in distress and disrepair. It’s being challenged in its homelands, from the US to Europe to Japan,
while in Russia and China it stands summarily dismissed. As citizens grow ever more contemptuous
of their leaders, leaders readily return the compliment – complaining that they’re hamstrung by the
short-sighted, unrealistic demands of their citizenry. Just a couple of decades after democracy was
proclaimed as the universal future – the riddle of human history solved – it seems fragile, ineffectual,
contingent.
In India, the impatience with democracy is perhaps not unreasonable, given how quickly we’ve
moved in such a short time, and how much further we wish to get. But one way to understand the
possibilities that democracy alone can underwrite is to remember the context of the India that existed
at the time that I wrote this book.
I was motivated, back then, by a different kind of concern about India’s democracy: that a certain kind
of majoritarianism might threaten our foundational commitment to diversity and pluralism.
In the mid-1990s, India had emerged from a deep economic crisis, only to ensnare itself in battles
over identity. What sort of a nation were we? Which groups or cultures had the right to claim special
privileges? Religion, caste, region: all were vigorously advanced as answers.
These answers seemed bent on blurring, even dissolving, the idea of India – the constitutive idea of
this ‘unnatural nation’. It was that idea that I sought to recover, in hopes of showing how it had made
India and kept India going. Part of the burden of my argument was that India’s politics was
proliferating a variety of ideas of India, some in contradiction and collision with one another. The
Indian idea had itself become a proudly plural idea – a measure as good as any of the original idea’s
success. And amidst that plurality were, perhaps inevitably, some conceptions that sought to
singularize India’s many religious and cultural identities, and make it a narrower place.
Today, in many parts of the country, those battles seem to have played themselves out – so much
blood under the bridge, or down the Sabarmati, as it were. The conventional view is that India’s
economic surge has stilled those fights over identity. And although there is some truth in that
explanation, it’s too partial a perception. It doesn’t address, for instance, why one of India’s most
developed and fast growing states, the calendar girl of big business – Gujarat – is also the purveyor
of India’s most chauvinistic and poisonous politics.
In fact, what has at least for an interval calmed such politics has been the workings, however
rickety, of democratic politics. It’s the capacity of India’s representative democracy to articulate –
and even to incite – India’s diversity, to give voice to differing interests and ideas of self, rather than
merely to aggregate common identities, that has saved India from the civil conflict and auto-
destruction typical of so many other states. Many of those states have been in fact smaller and less
diverse than India. Consider, for a start the ragged history of the states in India’s regional
neighbourhood. Yet the desire to impose a common identity has broken them down.
What has protected India from such outcomes is not any innate Indian virtue or cultural uniqueness.
Rather, it is the outcome of a political invention, the intricate architecture of constitutional democracy
established by India’s founders.
That constitutional democracy has prevented monolithic outcomes in India. It has stalled zealots in
their tracks, penned demagogues to their corrals, taken the wind out of populist sails – just as it has
also frustrated and slowed more positive or desirable outcomes. But that is the crucial, under-
recognized value of such a system: its capacity not to achieve the good, but to prevent the worse.
Democracy’s singular, rather astonishing achievement has been to keep India united as a political
space. And now that space has become a vast market whose strength lies in its internal diversity and
dynamism. It’s a market considerably attractive to global capital, and one that makes India a potential
engine of the global economy.
In the years ahead, whether old battles over identity stay becalmed will to a large extent depend on
the capacity of India’s political system to sustain and spread the country’s new growth. Rising
disparities – in income, wealth, and opportunity – are a global fact, but they can be particularly acute
in growing economies. For twenty-first century India, as economic growth spreads unevenly over the
productive landscape, the big questions will turn on the disequalizing effects of economic
transformation. This is not a question that any society, democratic or despotic, has been able to solve,
let alone any rapidly growing society – and certainly not China.