Diversity and Pluralism: The Perspective of a Globalized IndianExtracts of Shashi Tharoor’s talk

Diversity and Pluralism: The Perspective of a Globalized IndianExtracts of Shashi Tharoor’s talk on October 9, 2007

Shashi Tharoor, Diplomat and Writer, former Under-Secretary General of the United Nations, Chairman of Afras Ventures

Both as an Indian writer and as a former United Nations official, I am profoundly convinced that the one idea that has been indispensable to human progress is the idea of pluralism. The Indian adventure is that of human beings of different ethnicities and religions, languages and beliefs, working together under the same roof, dreaming the same dreams. That is also what the United Nations, at its best, seeks to achieve. And though I have now left the United Nations and live only intermittently in India, both experiences are fundamental to my own sense of the issues I am going to discuss with you today.

Approaching Indian pluralism

How can one approach India, this land of snow peaks and tropical jungles, with 23 major languages and 22,000 distinct «dialects», inhabited in the sixth year of the twenty-first century by over a billion individuals of every ethnic extraction known to humanity? How does one come to terms with a country whose population is over 40% illiterate but which has educated the world’s second-largest pool of trained scientists and engineers, whose teeming cities overflow while two out of three Indians scratch a living from the soil? What is the clue to understanding a country rife with despair and disrepair, which nonetheless moved a Mughal Emperor to declaim, “if on earth there be paradise of bliss, it is this, it is this, it is this...”? How does one gauge a culture which elevated non-violence to an effective moral principle, but whose freedom was born in blood and whose independence still soaks in it? How does one explain a land where peasant organizations and suspicious officials have attempted to close down Kentucky Fried Chicken as a threat to the nation, where a former Prime Minister bitterly criticizes the sale of Pepsi-Cola “in a country where villagers don’t have clean drinking water”, and which yet invents more sophisticated software for US computer manufacturers than any other country in the world? How can one determine the identity of an ageless civilization that was the birthplace of four major religions, a dozen different traditions of classical dance, eighty-five major political parties and three hundred ways of cooking the potato?

The short answer is that it can’t be done - at least not to everyone’s satisfaction. The country’s national motto, emblazoned on its governmental crest, is “Satyameva Jayaté”: Truth Alone Triumphs.

The question remains, however: whose truth? It is a question to which there are at least a billion answers.This pluralism is acknowledged in the way India arranges its own affairs: all groups, faiths, tastes and ideologies survive and contend for their place in the sun. At a time when most developing countries opted for authoritarian models of government to promote nation-building and to direct development, India chose to be a multi-party democracy. And despite many stresses and strains, including twenty-two months of autocratic rule during a “state of Emergency” declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975, a multi-party democracy - freewheeling, rumbustious, corrupt and inefficient, perhaps, but nonetheless flourishing - India has remained.

One result is that India strikes many as maddening, chaotic, inefficient and seemingly aimless as it muddles its way through the first decade of the twenty-first century. Another, though, is that India is not just a country, it is an adventure, one in which all avenues are open and everything is possible.

The Indian mind has been shaped by remarkably diverse forces: ancient Hindu tradition, myth and scripture; the impact of Islam and Christianity; and two centuries of British colonial rule. The result is unique. Many observers have been astonished by India’s survival as a pluralist state. But India could hardly have survived as anything else. Pluralism is a reality that emerges from the very nature of the country; it is a choice made inevitable by India’s geography and reaffirmed by its history.

At that famous midnight 60 years ago, the British Empire in India came to an end amidst the traumatic carnage of Partition with Pakistan and the sectarian violence that accompanied it. In these nearly six decades of independence, many thoughtful observers have seen a country more conscious than ever of what divides it: religion, region, caste, language, ethnicity. What makes India, then, a nation? To answer that, I’d like to take an Italian example - not “that” Italian example! Amidst the popular ferment that made an Italian nation out of a mosaic of principalities and statelets in the late 19th century, one Italian nationalist (Massimo Taparelli d’Azeglio) memorably wrote, “We have created Italy. Now all we need to do is to create Italians.” Strikingly enough, no Indian nationalist succumbed to the temptation to express the same thought - “We have created India; now all we need to do is to create Indians.”

1947: reassertion and creation of India

Such a sentiment would not, in any case, have occurred to Nehru, that pre-eminent voice of Indian nationalism, because he believed in the existence of India and Indians for millennia before he gave words to their longings; he would never have spoken of “creating” India or Indians, merely of being the agent for the reassertion of what had always existed but had been long suppressed. Nonetheless, the India that was born in 1947 was in a very real sense a new creation: a state that had made fellow citizens of the Ladakhi and the Laccadivian for the first time, that divided Punjabi from Punjabi for the first time, that asked the Keralite peasant to feel allegiance to a Kashmiri Pandit ruling in Delhi, also for the first time. Nehru would not have written of the challenge of “creating” Indians, but creating Indians was what, in fact, the nationalist movement did.

Let me illustrate what this means with a simple story. When India celebrated the 49th anniversary of its independence from British rule ten years ago, its then Prime Minister, H.D. Deve Gowda delivered the traditional Independence Day address to the nation in Hindi, India’s “national language”. Eight other Prime Ministers had done exactly the same thing 48 times before him, but what was unusual this time was that Deve Gowda, a Southerner from the state of Karnataka, spoke to the country in a language of which he did not know a word. Tradition and politics required a speech in Hindi, so he gave one - the words having been written out for him in his native Kannada script, in which they, of course, made no sense.

Such an episode is almost inconceivable elsewhere, but it represents the best of the oddities that help make India. Only in India could a country be ruled by a man who does not understand its “national language”; only in India, for that matter, is there a “national language” which half the population does not understand; and only in India could this particular solution be found to enable the Prime Minister to address his people.

One land embracing many

For, you see, we are all minorities in India. A typical Indian stepping off a train, a Hindi speaking Hindu male from the Gangetic plain state of Uttar Pradesh, might cherish the illusion that he represents the “majority community”, to use an expression much favored by the less industrious of our journalists. But he does not. As a Hindu he belongs to the faith adhered to by some 81% of the population, but a majority of the country does not speak Hindi; a majority does not hail from Uttar Pradesh; and if he were visiting, say, Kerala, he would discover that a majority is not even male. Worse, our archetypal UP Hindu has only to mingle with the polyglot, multi-coloured crowds (and I’m referring to the colour of their skins, not their clothes) thronging any of India’s major railway stations to realize how much of a minority he really is. Even his Hinduism is no guarantee of majorityhood, because his caste automatically places him in a minority as well: if he is a Brahmin, 90% of his fellow Indians are not; if he is a Yadav, a “backward class”, 85% of Indians are not, and so on.

Or take language. The Constitution of India recognizes 23 today, but in fact, there are 35 Indian languages which are spoken by more than a million people - and these are languages,with their own scripts, grammatical structures and cultural assumptions, not just dialects (and if were to count dialects within these languages, there are more than 22,000). Each of the native speakers of these languages is in a linguistic minority, for none enjoys majority status in India. Thanks in part to the popularity of Bombay’s Hindi cinema, Hindi is understood, if not always well spoken, by nearly half the population of India, but it is in no sense the language of the majority; indeed, its locutions, gender rules and script are unfamiliar to most Indians in the south or north-east.

Ethnicity further complicates the notion of a majority community. Most of the time, an Indian’s name immediately reveals where he is from and what his mother tongue is; when we introduce ourselves we are advertising our origins. Despite some inter-marriage at the elite levels in the cities, Indians still largely remain endogamous, and a Bengali is easily distinguished from a Punjabi. The difference this reflects is often more apparent than the elements of commonality. A Karnataka Brahmin shares his Hindu faith with a Bihari Kurmi, but feels little identity with him in respect of appearance, dress, customs, tastes, language or political objectives. At the same time a Tamil Hindu would feel that he has far more in common with a Tamil Christian or Muslim than with, say, a Haryanvi Jat with whom he formally shares a religion.

Why do I harp on these differences? Only to make the point that Indian nationalism is a rare animal indeed. It is not based on language. It is not based on geography (the “natural” geography of the subcontinent - framed by the mountains and the sea - has been hacked by the partition of 1947). It is not based on ethnicity (the “Indian” accommodates a diversity of racial types in which many Indians have more in common with foreigners than with other Indians). And it is not based on religion (we are home to every faith known to mankind, and Hinduism - a faith without a national organization, no established church or ecclesiastical hierarchy, no uniform beliefs or modes of worship - exemplifies as much our diversity as it does our common cultural heritage). Indian nationalism is the nationalism of an idea, the idea of an ever-ever land - emerging from an ancient civilization, united by a shared history, sustained by pluralist democracy.

This land imposes no narrow conformities on its citizens: you can be many things and one thing. You can be a good Muslim, a good Keralite and a good Indian all at once. Where Freudians note the distinctions that arise out of “the narcissism of minor differences”, in India we celebrate the commonality of major differences. To stand Michael Ignatieff’s famous phrase on its head, we are a land of belonging rather than of blood.

So the idea of India is of one land embracing many. It is the idea that a nation may endure differences of caste, creed, color, culture, cuisine, conviction, costume and custom, and still rally around a democratic consensus. That consensus is around the simple principle that in a democracy you don’t really need to agree - except on the ground rules of how you will disagree. The reason India has survived all the stresses and strains that have beset it for fifty years, and that led so many to predict its imminent disintegration, is that it maintained consensus on how to manage without consensus.

No pressure to conform

Nowhere do assumptions differ more than on the simple issue of secularism. Where French dictionaries define “secularism” as the absence of religion, but Indian secularism meant a profusion of religions, none of which was privileged by the state. Secularism in India did not mean irreligiousness. Rather, secularism meant, in the Indian tradition, multi-religiousness.

Throughout the decades after Independence, the political culture of the country reflected these “secular” assumptions and attitudes. Though the Indian population was 82% Hindu and the country had been partitioned as a result of a demand for a separate Muslim homeland, three of India’s eleven Presidents were Muslims; so were innumerable Governors, Cabinet Ministers, Chief Ministers of states, Ambassadors, Generals, and Supreme Court Justices. During the war with Pakistan in 1971, the Indian Air Force in the northern sector was commanded by a Muslim [Lateef]; the Army Commander was a Parsi [Manekshaw], the General Officer Commanding the forces that marched into Bangladesh was a Sikh [Aurora], and the General flown in to negotiate the surrender of the Pakistani forces in East Bengal was Jewish [Jacob]. That is India.

Three years ago, India showed the world the sight of a Roman Catholic political leader (Sonia Gandhi) winning an election and making way for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn in as Prime Minister by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam) in a country that is 81% Hindu. That is extraordinary, an event without precedent or parallel in the history of the world. After all, the world’s oldest democracy hasn’t yet managed to elect a President in nearly 220 years who isn’t white, male and Christian.

So here is an Indian lesson for the world: a land that imposes no exactions or conformities on its citizens. And an Indian identity that, in turn, imposes no pressure to conform.

Globalization versus the digital divide

Now I will be quick to admit that the Indian experience is in many ways unique. Yet this kind of pluralism is precisely what we see around us in our globalizing world. We will have to know each other better, learn to see ourselves as others see us, learn to recognize hatred and deal with its causes, learn to dispel fear, and above all just learn about each other.

The mass media has a crucial role to play in this endeavour. But even Christine Ockrent will admit that the mass media that now rings our globalized world still principally reflects the interests of its producers. What passes for international culture is usually the culture of the economically developed world. Ask yourselves: who makes the cut to enter the global imagination in our brave new world? Yes, there is the occasional third world voice, but it speaks a first world language.

Some believe that the bias inherent in the mass media will be overcome by the Internet, and there is no doubt that the internet can be a democratizing tool. In some parts of the world, it has already become one, since large amounts of information are now accessible to almost anyone. But that is not yet true in the developing world. The stark reality of the Internet today is that there is a digital divide: you can tell the rich from the poor by their Internet connections. The information revolution today, unlike the French Revolution, is a revolution with a lot of liberté, some fraternité, and no égalité. So the poverty line is not the only line about which we have to think; there is also the high-speed digital line, the fibre optic line - all the lines that exclude those who are literally not plugged in to the possibilities of our brave new world. The key to the Internet divide is the computer keyboard. Those who do not have one risk marginalization; their imaginations cannot cross borders.

The world being knit together by the internet is being challenged by the perception of the threat it poses to our distinctive individual identities. In many ways, the fundamental conflict of our times is the clash between, no, not civilizations, but doctrines - religious and ethnic fundamentalism on the one hand, secular consumerist capitalism on the other.

Human identity: the need to recognize complexity

Every one of us has many identities. Amartya Sen has recently reminded us that ascribing “singular identities” to people (for example, calling someone “a Muslim” while overlooking other aspects of his individual make-up) leads to the “miniaturization of human beings” and the “belittling of human identity”. He has argued passionately against reducing individuals to a “choiceless singularity” (few people, after all, have a choice about the religion they are born into) when all of us have so much more complexity to our identities. As he rather wittily explains: “The same person can be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theatre lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician, and someone who is deeply committed to the view that there are intelligent beings in outer space with whom it is extremely urgent to talk (preferably in English).”

This is all very well, but sometimes religion obliges us to deny the truth about our own complexity by obliterating the multiplicity inherent in our identities. It is true that the argument for the primacy of an individual’s religious identity, to the exclusion of other affiliations and associations, ignores the demands of other (explicitly non-religious) commitments. The separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971, after all, occurred despite their common religious identity, because an ethnic and cultural identity (Bengali) came to mean more than the purely religious label (Muslim).

And yet we need to understand why so many today, in privileging one amongst the many identities they could lay claim to, have fallen back on religion. When other avenues of identity mobilization are either restricted (in autocratic states) or difficult (in societies where political patterns are entrenched and admit few interlopers), ordinary people tend to fall back upon the one identity that seems basic to them. Of course there can be something precious and valuable about religion, about having a faith that allows a human being to see himself at one with others stretching their hands out towards God around the world. But can we separate religion from identity? Can we dream of a world in which religion has an honoured place but where the need for spirituality will no longer be associated with the need to belong? If identity can relate principally to citizenship rather than faith, to a land rather than a doctrine, and if that identity is one that can live in harmony with other identities, then we might resist both Jihad and McWorld. If we all come to understand and accept that every one of us has many identities, then perhaps we can assert each of them without attacking others.

The cultural construct of identity

As a writer, I am attracted to what one might call the cultural construct of identity, of which religion is only a part, and to many, not even the most important part. Now we must admit that many have seen globalization as a threat to the differentiated cultures of the non-Western parts of the world. As an Indian author, coming from a country that has globalized more rapidly than most, and whose culture has therefore been subject to Western influences of a highly visible kind, I am particularly conscious of this. And yet I would argue that my country’s recent experience with the global reach of Western consumer products demonstrates that we can drink Coca-Cola without becoming coca-colonized. Despite the fears of many, Baywatch and burgers have not supplanted Bharatnatyam dances and Bhelpuri snacks in India.

India’s own popular culture is also part of globalization – the products of “Bollywood” are exported to expatriate Indian communities abroad. Indian music, Indian fashion and Indian movie stars are also demonstrating new forms of “convergence” in the West today. With that convergence comes an interesting form of disruption: in England today, Indian curry houses employ more people than the iron and steel, coal and shipbuilding industries combined. So the Empire can strike back.

Where does this leave the cultural construct of identity? In my first novel, The Great Indian Novel, I reinvented our 2000 year-old epic, The Mahabharata, as a satirical retelling of the story of 20th century India, from the British days to the present. My motivation was a conscious one.

Most developing countries are also formerly colonized countries, and one of the realities of colonialism is that it appropriated the cultural definition of its subject peoples. Writing about India in English, I cannot but be aware of those who have done the same before me, others with a greater claim to the language but a lesser claim to the land. But their stories are not my stories, their heroes are not mine; and my fiction seeks to reclaim my country’s heritage for itself, to tell, in an Indian voice, a story of India. Let me stress, a story of India; for there are always other stories, and other Indians to tell them. How important is such a reassertion of identity in the face of the enormous challenges confronting a country like India? Can literature, for example, matter in a land of poverty, suffering and underdevelopment? I believe it does -indeed that cultural reassertion is as vital as economic development.

My novel begins with the proposition that India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay. Such sentiments are the privilege of the satirist; but as a novelist, I believe, with Molière, that you have to entertain in order to edify. But edify to what end? In my own writing I have pointed to one responsibility - to contribute towards, and to help articulate and give expression to, the cultural identity (shifting, variegated, and multiple, in the Indian case) of the post-colonial society, caught up in the throes of globalization.

The vast majority of developing countries have emerged recently from the incubus of colonialism; both colonialism and globalization have in many ways fractured and distorted their cultural self-perceptions. Development will not occur without a reassertion of identity. Writers and creative artists must find new ways (and revive old ones) of expressing their evolving culture, just as society strives, in the midst of globalization, to find new ways of being and becoming. But in speaking of a cultural reassertion of identity, I do not want to defend a closed construct. I believe Indians will not become any less Indian if, in Mahatma Gandhi’s metaphor, we open the doors and windows of our country and let foreign winds blow through our house.

In our shrinking globe, as someone once observed about water pollution, we all live
downstream. We are all interconnected. But we can only sustain that connection if we allow each other to be ourselves - if we understand the myriad manifestations of the human condition, and still appreciate the universality of human aims and aspirations.

And to do all this, we must promote pluralism, within societies and between societies. The only way to ensure that this challenge is met across the world is to preserve cultural and imaginative freedom in all societies; to guarantee that individual voices find expression.

The various expressions of truth

There is an old Indian story about Truth. It seems that in ancient times a brash young warrior sought the hand of a beautiful princess. The king, her father, thought the warrior was a bit too cocksure and callow; he told him he could only marry the princess once he had found Truth. So the young warrior set out on a quest for Truth. He went to temples and to monasteries, to mountaintops where sages meditated and to forests where ascetics scourged themselves, but nowhere could he find Truth. Despairing one day and seeking refuge from a thunderstorm, he found himself in a dank, musty cave. There, in the darkness, was an old hag, with warts on her face and matted hair, her skin hanging in folds from her bony limbs, her teeth broken, her breath malodorous. She greeted him; she seemed to know what he was looking for. They talked all night, and with each word she spoke, the warrior realized he had come to the end of his quest. She was Truth.

In the morning, when the storm broke, the warrior prepared to return to claim his bride. “Now that I have found Truth,” he said, “what shall I tell them at the palace about you?” The wizened old crone smiled. “Tell them”, she said, “tell them that I am young and beautiful.” So Truth is not always true; but that does not mean Truth does not exist. It just takes many forms.

We have heard in the past that the world must be made safe for democracy. That goal is increasingly being realized; it is now time for all of us to work to make the world safe for diversity.