Introduction

Dr SN Balagangadhara (Balu) is one of the foremost contemporary philosophers of India. For four decades, he was at the University of Ghent in Belgium where his research program at the Department of Comparative Cultures made sterling contributions towards a better understanding of India. India has a great intellectual heritage and a huge corpus of texts (the broad five groups -Vedas, Upavedas, Vedangas, Puranas, and Darshanas) covering all fields of human activity-secular and the sacred, is a testimony of the capacity of Indians to create knowledge by reflecting on their own experiences without any foreign influences.

The colonial rules (Islamic and European) severely disrupted this capacity. We turned from creating knowledge to just protecting it from annihilation. In the process of protection, many times Indian intellectuals moulded themselves to western criticisms against us and formulated their responses. The colonials said we were a corrupt religion with a corrupt priesthood. Our intellectuals like Raja Roma Mohan Roy accepted this and tried to create a ‘pure’ Hinduism based on the Upanishads ridding themselves of the ‘superficial’ rituals and the ‘tyrannical’ priests. The whole so-called Hindutva process was initiated as a response to colonial criticisms. There was never any attempt to look at alien religions and alien cultures from our viewpoint.

Independence should ideally have been a break when, finally, we could have rejected the colonial discourses and adopted an Indian lens to view ourselves and the world. This was an opportunity to recover our lost tradition of creating knowledge independently. Sadly, it was a lost opportunity. The academia is now filled with an even more noxious Marxist philosophy which is intensely inimical to Indian traditions. Their view of a linear history was very clear: a primitive Indian past that needed steering to a golden future (represented by modern Europe). In a few crucial generations, our education system could deracinate most of the Indians successfully.

Our social sciences too remained as colonial in their outlook as possible. Their tools did not change and their results did not differ significantly from that of the previous colonials. Western social sciences were finally secularized theology; hence in a perverse manner, our social sciences too were making the same conclusions about India as Christian missionaries made in the 19^th century. Our social sciences also concluded that Hinduism is a religion constructed by the wily Brahmins with a very immoral caste system.

At no point did they question the older narratives of the colonials whether religions or the caste system truly existed in India? Was the phenomenon of Hinduism which the colonials called a ‘religion’ something else? The varnas and jatis- the social reality of India, do they really configure into a caste system? Is anybody aware of these caste rules? Despite the huge contradictions arising from matching theory to social data, why did we persist with the colonial understanding of India?

These are important questions and here comes the ‘colonial consciousness’ of Dr SN Balagangadhara- a persisting violence on the colonized by a permanent altering of their intellectual frameworks. This happens in a different period much after the colonials have left. In the seven decades of a corrupted narrative foisted on us by a deep nexus of politicians, academia, media, and the bureaucracy, most Indians respond by a numb silence to the question ‘What does it mean to be an Indian?’ Balu and Sarika begin the What does it mean to be ‘Indian? by emphatically saying that the received view about the answer is either false or fragmentary. They have come with this brilliant set of essays to answer this question.

We remain divided, angry, confused, and sad at the situation in the country today. Everyone has a reason to be angry. One needs to read this book carefully to understand what Indian culture is and why we need to be proud of it. This, one can do, without hating the West as a narrative of any other kind rapidly descends into. Dr Balu shows that both the West and the East stand as equals and we both can learn from each other. However, one needs to throw off the yoke of colonial consciousness and view ourselves and the West through our own lenses. This is an urgent task for the future.

Histories, Itihasas, Myths, and Stories

‘Secular historians’, standing against the ‘religiosity’ of the masses, taught us that our stories were merely disguised historiographies, poetic exaggerations, or lies by our ancestors. There is a typical Indian attitude, beyond the comprehension of somebody from the western traditions, when they say, ‘Rama and Krishna may not have existed but Ramayana or Mahabharata are always true.’ What separates this Indian attitude from the west when dealing with stories and legends? In the western intellectual tradition, the dominant idea is that myths are false and facts (the base for scientific historiography) are true.

However, growing up as Indians, we learn that we should treat our stories and epics (Itihasas) as different from the claims of our history, geography, and science lessons. As Dr Balu asks, ‘What do we want, a history or a past?’ Converting Itihasa into history would destroy our past, as the remembered past of a thriving and rich culture. Importantly, regarding divine stories, the issue is not about the existence of divinities and whether their world also exists; but that such stories are not about humans and their world. One can make true or false statements only about the human and the mundane. The huge number of stories, unique to Indian culture, play a very important role in knowledge transmission. These stories are exemplars- entities solving problems or trying to execute original actions in novel situations. As action heuristics, (rules of thumb), they are neither true nor false.

The British were the heirs to the traditions of the Church and later Enlightenment philosophers who scrutinized Roman and Greek epics narratives for logic, coherence, and truth value. They failed to understand that these were not true or false doctrines and were not descriptions of the world. These ‘mythologies’ became simply superstitious expressions of primitive fears and hence were either lies or poetic exaggerations.

British ‘liberalism’ and the Nehruvian ‘secularism’ unfortunately brought another reaction into existence (exemplified by some Sangh Parivar elements) which claimed that stories about the past are literally our histories and not poetic exaggerations or lies. These ideologues of the Sangh Parivar threaten to destroy Indian culture by a catastrophic cocktail of Nationalism and Christian discourses on history, says Balu.

Culture and Cultural Differences

In an important chapter, Balu discusses his important thesis of culture and cultural differences. Any culture builds two rich, complex, and interlinked storehouses of linguistic (texts, scriptures, newspapers, books) and actionable items (modelled on family, friends, and society) to flourish in the two basic surrounding environments- the natural and the social. These storehouses are the resources for socialization. In the broadest terms, ‘culture’ is the available resources for socialization. Cultural differences reside in how the culture utilizes the resources.  

The diverse learning processes (the socialization resources) coordinate and establish ‘a configuration of learning’ where one learning process is dominant and other processes subordinate. Cultures originate, reproduce, and transmit across generations by these configurations of learning and the differences between such configurations (which dominant and which subordinate) decide the cultural differences. Religion creates a configuration that creates western culture; ritual creates a configuration that produces Indian culture. Thus, cultural differences are not along geographical,  linguistic, or even religious (in the narrow sense) lines.

Christianity and Islam entered India and adapted to the existing culture. They held their beliefs and practices by adapting to Indian uses of the resources of socialization. In this process, these religions undergo modifications in how the believers live their daily life which does not affect the content of their beliefs or their places of worship. It is exactly this kind of adaptation that many Madrassas and evangelicals militate against. A vibrant Indian culture allows for these religions and absorbs their drive to create other configurations of learning within its own multiplicities.

Experiences, Anubhava, and Denial of Indian Experiences

Indian traditions have made experience and its interrogation central to their enquiry and create knowledge. In Indian culture, knowledge is mainly experiential in nature (practical knowledge). The goal of the knowledge is to then shape and transform the human experience in turn and give them structure. We slice the raw materials of experiences (events, persons, objects, thoughts, feelings, and perceptions) into manageable fragments and give them structure.

We use ‘resources of socialization’ available in our culture to structure our experiences. These are family life, friends and peer groups, formal and informal education, civil institutions, and organizations (schools, trades unions, political parties, media), stories, rituals, lore, legends, poetry and so on. We thus structure our experiences and we learn how to do that from our cultures. An unstructured experience becomes a reason for trauma. Anubhava, the Sanskrit near equivalent of experience, indicates an appropriate way of being-in-the-world with regards to things, events, actions, and people that we encounter. The emphasis of Anubhava is on apt transitions from one state to another (state-change) which also involve learning.

A significant difference between western experiences and Indian experiences (or Anubhava) is how we look at truth and falsehood. For the Western culture, truth and falsehood divide the world of statements into two exhaustive partitions. Indians, in a different route, privilege knowledge above truth. While knowledge is always true, not everything that is true (like a telephone directory) is also knowledge. Thus, in Indian culture, even truth (a true statement or a ‘fact’) can surprisingly hinder learning and prevent the emergence of knowledge. It is knowledge (always true) that liberates but not truth.

When filters interfere with the process of learning, we stop having an access to our experience. The factors preventing access to our own experiences and thus impeding knowledge are many: Ignorance (Maya), culture, society, individual psychology, are some impediments. To this added the two colonialisms (Islamic and British) which introduced filters causing a crippled state and a crippled experience instead of an apt state. Balu says, the crippled experience and the crippled human became the norm and the normal.

One way of preventing access is by the adoption of an alien way of looking at Indian texts like ‘verifiable’ historical facts. Western traditions, even today, end up denying Indian experiences causing great intellectual violence. The western explanations of Indian experiences that we routinely reproduce (fertility cults, symbolisms, sexual repressions, hypostatizing abstract concepts like ‘nation’, the ‘reification’ of experiences into objects, and so on) hint that there is no such thing as an ‘Indian experience’ unless they are Indian ‘hallucinations’, says Balu. We sense ‘wrongness’ when this happens but there is silence for the answer.

In a note of caution, Balu says that ordinary people, philosophers, and scientists often confuse an explanation of experience with ‘experience’ itself. Consequently, rejecting the explanation does not equate to rejecting the experience itself. If we deny the existence of ‘the’ Indian caste system or deny its causal role in ‘explaining’ oppression in India, it does not mean we deny the existence of jatis or oppression in Indian society.

Reflecting on Experience:  Superstructures and Substructures

Taking the example of anger, Balu shows how Indian culture access experiences differently than the west. We share with our fellow humans a biological ‘substratum’- the sub-structure of our personality. Resting upon it is a unique super-structure expressing our individual psychology. Introspection, depth psychology, and psychoanalysis- typical products of the west analyse the different layers in the superstructure. The higher we go, the more unique we become and, in fact, becomes the problem.

In contrast, Indian culture would teach that the super-structure consists of many idiosyncrasies (like anger) and are almost inconsequential. Indian culture focuses on the foundation or the sub-structure leading to self-knowledge. Introspection generates pain (and such allied emotions); self-knowledge makes one happier and generates a sense of freedom. In one culture, introspection of the unique identity is the route; in another, the ‘unique’ is incidental and contingent. In the West, one deals with the internal mental life as an expression of the unique ‘self’ that each human being has; in India, there is neither an inner self unique to each one of us nor is there a privileged knower that cognizes the meaning of these unique expressions. This perhaps explains the lack of popularity of psychoanalysis in the Indian culture.

Colonial Experience and Colonial consciousness

Colonialism has been one of the most significant events in the last three hundred years or so for Indian culture.  What exactly is immoral about this? ‘Colonial consciousness’, an important thesis of Balu’s research program, is a framework that denies access to our experience and makes us reproduce some sets of colonial ideas as though they describe our experience. This process continues to the present times much after the colonizers have left. British colonialism introduced the framework about the superiority of the western culture as ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ that was both presupposed and proved. The colonized accepted this.

Islamic rule laid the foundation by impacting our culture in multiple ways. They did not merely rule, collect revenues, convert forcefully, or destroy temples. Islamic colonialism impeded the transmission of the many theories about people, society, and nature that had crystallized in the Indian culture. Islamic colonization damaged the production and capacity of intellectuals to produce our ‘equivalents’ of western theories. These intellectuals turned simply to protect the existing traditions. The British colonized us before recuperation was possible.

How does colonial consciousness and accepting colonial claims happen? Balu says that this happens strongly by a process of secularization of many religious ideas. Religion expanding by well-known direct conversion of people is almost inconsequential when compared to the second way of expanding- secularization. Christian doctrines spread wide beyond the confines of the community of believers in ‘secular’ clothes.

The secularization story of western culture is that the enlightenment thinkers successfully ‘fought’ the dominance of Christianity on social, political, and economic life. Humankind now looked at ‘reason’ and ‘scientificity’. As heirs to that period, we are proud citizens of the modern-day world believing in democracy, reason in social life, human rights, and a private religion away from state intervention.  Balu shows that these ideas, however, are simply Christian theological ideas in a secular mantle as though these are ‘neutral’ and ‘rational’.  This is not to suggest a conspiracy but there has been a secularization of ideas about Man and Society which accept the truth of the Bible.

The process of secularization is evident in many areas of social discourses. For example, according to Christianity, Hinduism was immoral and is the foundation of the immoral Indian ‘caste system’. Our present social and political sciences repeat precisely this story. This secularization is invisible to Indian and western intellectuals both because the research framework of social sciences was set up explicitly by Christian theologians using resources of Christian theology. The problem of state and society, the limits of political power, and so on were actual issues confronted by the Church. The so-called social sciences have taken over these questions and answers but the explicit theology fades in the background.

Western intellectuals are blind to secularized theology because that is all they know.  That is why when one draws upon the resources of the existing social sciences, one is drawing upon Christian theology. Balu reiterates that even if social sciences oppose a straightforward Christian understanding openly, their conclusions are no different. This is an insidious process of the secularization of Christian ideas.  

The British framework secularizing the Christian framework recast Indian traditions in terms of religions; it described Hinduism with a ‘tyrannical priesthood’ as a variant of Catholic Christianity and Buddhism as a variant of Protestantism. This became the core experience of Indian culture too as a class of Indian intellectuals accepted their claims.

Colonial consciousness works its hand when our thinkers believe that ‘Hinduism’ also needs ‘reform’. The Protestant Reformation in Europe was a rebellion against human additions that the Roman Catholic Church had ‘introduced’ like the canon laws, the practise of indulgences, and so on. Thus, religion becomes corrupt when human beings add to God’s revelation. The Indian ‘reformers’, in the name of Protestant reformation (Brahmo Samaj for example), want to similarly ‘delete’ things from the ‘original revelation’ and ‘add’ new things.

Colonial Consciousness and The Example of Law

Internalising many ‘axiomatic’ ideas of western culture like Law as the foundation of a civilised society and a nation is another example of colonial consciousness. For the British, practices of different communities, no matter how old and venerated, should have their foundation in Law. The British came with absolute conviction that human beings are set on earth to obey the laws of God. They located the laws that governed the Indian culture in a text (the laws of Manu) which they codified and insisted that the people of India followed the codification.  Manu acquires the exalted status of a Lawgiver for the ‘Hindus’, even though it is unclear what exactly his act resulted in regarding religion, social practices, and in creating a nation.

However, Balu asks, what if Law is not the foundation of society but merely a tool to regulate reasonable interactions and find reasonable solutions to human conflicts in a society? What if Law does not create a nation, but instead groups become a cultured people precisely because of the colourful variety of their local practices? What if Law does not dictate but allows old customs and traditions to do their work? The introduction of such a judicial system forced the Indians to become volunteers in the process of denying their own experience. Laws took on a status and force they never had in their culture, even if it was their ‘own’ laws. Indian intellectuals now started providing scriptural foundation to cultural practices.

The author says that the way the West arranges its own society is not an argument for its civilisational priority nor an evidence of the inferiority of other ways of organising social life. If Indian intelligentsia believed this, it is not possible that people seek the intervention of the apparatuses of the State in human practices that carry the stamp of traditions (Sabarimala, Jalikattu, Pasubali as examples). Balu rues that such an impotent consciousness constitutes the class of Indian intellectuals today who fail to produce any interesting reflections and bring about any regeneration of the Indian culture.

Religions and Traditions 

One example of colonial consciousness is the persistent idea that there are religions in India. The West did not provide a false or wrong description of the social and cultural reality in India. But problematically, the unity they created by tying these ‘facts’ together is a unity only for them called ‘Hinduism’. Balu says that the theory that guided western culture was Christian theology.

The beliefs and practices that went into constructing this unity do exist. Indeed, the puja, the sandhyavandanam of the Brahmins, the Sahasranamams, the Purushasukta, our notions of dharma and adharma, all exist, says Balu. Only that these beliefs and practices (even when taken together) do not constitute either a religion or a unified phenomenon termed as ‘Hinduism’.

In this sense, Hinduism as a ‘religion’ (a sociological and metaphysical impossibility as he discusses elsewhere in detail) has no existence outside the colonial experiences of India. They could not imagine that cultures could exist without religions and thus constructed Hinduism (with offshoots like Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism). Indian traditions had nothing like One Book, One Temple, One Messenger, and even the universal concept of God (there is no concept of God in Jainism and Buddhism). Yet there was overlooking of all contradictions and inconsistencies.

Balu discusses the varied arguments ‘proving’ Hinduism and shows that they are simply false and unjustified claims. Amongst the various arguments which he shoots down, one is that ‘Hindutva’ would not be possible without Hinduism. He says this presupposes as true what requires proving. The burden of proof is the other way: one must show that Hindutva comes into being because of Hinduism. Is there an alternative description to Indian phenomena? Yes, India is a land of traditions.

Problematically, intellectuals are transforming some of the multiple Indian traditions into a single ‘religion’ called ‘Hinduism’. While the term ‘Hindu’ might be convenient, the danger is in trying to develop ‘doctrines’, ‘theologies’, ‘catechisms’ and our own ‘Ten Commandments’ so that we could identify people following ‘Hinduism’. Being a ‘Hindu’ is simply a continuation of ancestral traditions. The hallmark of traditions is an ‘indifference to differences’ which transcends the standard ‘tolerances’ and ‘acceptances’ forced on religions through secularism.

Balu says, today, we are not yet able to make sense of the presence of these two properties of traditions (broadly sampradayas and paramparas): (a) the enormous flexibility in belonging to a tradition and the sharpness with which the boundaries are drawn between traditions; (b) the possibility that any element could be absent from a tradition and yet it could maintain identity and distinction. Personal habits and attitudes (including atheism) also do not determine the belonging to a tradition. Reason always works as a break for excesses of practices in traditional cultures. Thus, no modification of traditional practices has ever resulted in great ruptures in the social or cultural fabric of India.

Traditions are not religions or philosophies. They are what they are- traditions. To an ill-formed question, ‘why practice a tradition?’ (why Bindi; why Linga puja; why bangles), the simple answer is that there is no ‘special’ reason to continue a traditional practice. For someone rooted in Semitic religions, the claims of religions must be true if they are to remain religions at all. What is the way traditional cultures approach their texts? Rama or Krishna may or may not have existed but Ramayana and Mahabharata are always true. The notion of ‘truth’ to characterize practices is to commit a category mistake in traditions.

Studying Ourselves and the West from Our Background: Problematic Discourses

We relate to our own traditions and our own cultures the way the West has understood them.  However, this is not a reason for us to become enemies of the West. We need to ‘reinvent’ and ‘rediscover’ the process of transmitting our culture the Indian way. Balu insists that, as a first important step, we should try and describe the west as it appears to us, against the background of our culture, without reproducing the theories and descriptions of the western intellectuals.

How does the West appear to us? How do we appear to ourselves? Balu says we need to do this because our relation to ourselves and our past is determined by what the West has said about both. A tremendous intellectual violence ensues when the west, with their own terms of debate, sets the narratives about India and flatly denies our experiences. (‘Lingam puja is phallus worshipping; Ganesha’s trunk is actually a limp phallus; Lingam puja is a fertility cult; and so on). We need to tell that because the traditional description has the form of a definition (Shiva puja=ritual to this form) no sensible discussion or dissection about traditional practice is possible.

Taking the examples of puja, idol-worship, polytheism, and God, Balu then shows how we have made European descriptions and translations our own without questioning them. These borrow heavily from Christian theological concepts. Transposing such ideas to understand our traditions and practices leads to not only confusion but finally a deracination. As Balu puts it sharply, to understand the mother, we needed to understand the mother-in-law. This was the position of intellectuals in trying to understand the Indian traditions and cultures in the framework of western cultures and western theories.

Similarly, many discourses (Sanskrit, temple entry restrictions for menstruating women, the temple practices which offends certain groups, the ‘caste system’, and Brahmacharya Sadhus avoiding women) attempt to prove the discriminatory nature of Indian traditions. Balu shows that common to these and many such arguments are their ‘normative’ assumptions and judgements.

Colonialism, Colonial Consciousness, and the Impact on Translations

Translations play an important role in understanding different cultures but there is violence when there is no understanding of the individual cultures. This routinely happens when Indologists and Sanskritists translate our texts. Both are ignorant of Indian culture and yet we accept them. This reveals another layer of “colonial consciousness”. We have taken to English because we do not (intuitively) know what words from our own languages mean.

Colonialism and colonial consciousness work in the use of certain Indic words which stopped making sense to us except as translations in English. We accepted such translations of words like Manas, raga, iccha, chitta, gyana, buddhi, vikara, Bhavana, Dharma, papa, punya, adharma, and so on.  Their descriptions replaced our reflections about our own experiences, and their translations became our translations. We did not understand the meaning of the words we used in our daily language and we were unable to challenge their descriptions or their translations. In both colonialisms, we continued learning of using the words without being able to identify for ourselves what these units referred to. ‘Manas’ became ‘mind’; ‘bhavana’ became ‘feelings’; Dharma became ‘ethics’, ‘law’, and ‘religion’; ‘Ishwara’ named a god; ‘Deva’ became ‘God’; ‘puja’ became ‘worship’; and so on.

Thus, the earlier generations of Indians did not object to the translations of the British: we knew neither ‘Dharma’ nor ‘normative ethics’.  Our understanding of ‘Ishwara’ or ‘Brahman’ is as shallow as our understanding of ‘God’.  Balu, using ‘freedom’ as a concept, says that, according to western culture, moral action is impossible if it is not ‘free’; according to us, without strict determinism, moral action is impossible. Yet, ‘freedom’ is a ‘self-explanatory’ concept for most of us. We neither understand the technical (or theoretical) terms we use in our daily intercourse nor the English words we translate into native languages.

Concluding Remarks

To the question, ‘What Does It Mean to be ‘Indian’, the book does not provide easy answers. Every single Indian with a semblance of education needs to read this book which packs with ideas never probably entertained all our lives. Some ideas are easy to grasp; some require intense thinking on the part of the reader to do the unpacking and reach an ‘a-ha’ moment. It can be difficult reading at some places but then the author promises right in the beginning that this book is for the intelligent and thinking layperson. There is never a spoon-feeding of the ideas.

Almost everything is wrong with the way we understand India. We are full of colonial understandings regarding our religions; our ‘caste system’; our stories and legends; our psychological attitudes; our understanding of texts and scriptures; our understanding of law; and so on. It is an uphill task to first dethrone our present narratives and then understand ourselves fresh. At no point does Balu asks us to hate the West. He only insists on developing our own social theories, our own lenses, to view ourselves and the west. We have only put western lenses till now to view India and that has caused great damage to Indians and Indian culture.

The book needs slow reading; the book needs repeated reading. It is not possible to understand everything which the author is trying to say at one single go. Maybe, I speak from the point of view of a deep admirer, but I would stick my neck out to claim that this is one of the most important books in independent India. I go to the Bhagwad Gita and gain something new every single time I read it. Arguable of course, I would place this book on a similar standing with regards to understanding Indian culture.

Anyway, this book certainly would stimulate its readers to explore other seminal works of Dr SN Balagangadhara and his school regarding Indian religions, caste, and many other aspects of Indian culture. The Heathen in His Blindness; Western Foundations of The Caste System; Reconceptualizing India Studies; Europe, India and The Limits of Secularism are some of these. Whatever the impact of Dr Balu’s ideas is, one thing is certain. One understands how important the humanities and social sciences are in building the country. They provide the foundational basis of a country by providing a correct understanding and pride in one’s own culture and heritage before one can think about the sciences and technologies.

Sadly, we ignored this foundational base and a selective ideology occupied this vacuum. Most people ran after the sciences in independent India and a consequence of this is, of course, great achievements but with almost a sense of shame towards our own heritage. Indian culture is not perfect but it has solutions too for its problems. For too long, we have only listened to what people have said about us. It is time that we start speaking about ourselves from our point of view. As a next step, we can talk about the world from our perspective. We may even have solutions for the world. That is a task for the future and there is no better place to begin than this powerful book.

 

Book link: What does it mean to be ‘Indian?