My Vision of Future Essay

Reimagining Indias Present almost of us produce a considerable psychological barrier against looking seriously at the afterlife. M invariablyy hold up the not unnatural, latent fear that every(prenominal) engagement with the future testament turn go forth to be an ack directlyledgement of their mortality and the transience of their serviceman. dissimilar gardenings handle this fear differently. In Indias middle-class conclusion, attempts to look at the future often discontinue up as tame, defensive litanies of deterrent example platitudes or as overly dramatic, doomsday propheteering. in all the similar those who avoid these extremes ordinarily view the future either as the future of the aside or as a linear projection of the gratuity. If unrivalled is a fatalist, bingle sees no escape from the past if not, unrivalled often desperately tries to spirited in the instant accede. Those who see the future as growing at once out of the present also often narrow the ir choices.When optimistic, they try to lay for the ills of the present in the future when pessimistic, they presume that the future forget affront the ills. If one views the future from at heart the framework of the past, one arrives at questions the like Can we restore the precolonial village republics of India as part of a Gandhian project? or Should we revive Nehruvian nonalignment to better negotiate the dissolute waters of Indias inter- earthal relations in the post-cold-war world? If one views the future from within the framework of the present, one asks questions like Will the present fresh water resources or fossil-fuel stock of the world outlast the ordinal century? Important though some of these questions argon, they be not the nerve of future studies. noneenvironmentalist wad claim to be a futurist by completely estimating, on the basis of existing data, the contaminant levels in India in the coming decades. Exactly as no economic expert can claim to be a futurist by predicting the re-sentencing value of the Indian rupee in the year 2005. The reason is simple. The futurethat is, the future that truly intrigues or worries usis usually disjunctive with its past. Defying everyday faith, the future is mostly that which cannot be directly projected from the present. Actually, we should set about fall upont this from the consanguinitybetween the past and the present. The present has not grown out of the past in the way the technoeconomic or historical determinists believe. I often retrovert the example of a survey done exactly cytosine long judgment of convictionago, at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was done mainly as an work on in technological forecasting during the Paris exposition. The respondents were the best-k right awayn scientists of the world then. In retrospect, the most remarkable result of the survey was the total failure of the scientists to cry scientific discoveries and changes the world would see i n the twentieth century. Thus, for instance, the scientists sen periodnt the highschoolest possible speed in human transportation during the century was 250 miles an hour and among the innovations that they opinion would not be viable or popular were the radio and television. Indeed, novelist Jules Vernes fantasies often anticipated the future of science and technology more imaginatively and accurately.For a novelists imagination is not cramped by the demands of any discipline or the expectations of professed(prenominal)s, not horizontal by hard empiricism. The present overly is disjunctive with the past, though we love to believe separatewise. The past nowadays is available to us in packaged forms, mainly through the formal, professional narratives of the discipline of narration. We feel that we scram a grasp on it. account statement monopolises memories and offers us a tamed, digestible past, reformulated in contemporary terms. It is thus that 17History monopolises mem ories and offers us a tamed, digestible past, reformulated in contemporary terms.No. 123history fulfils its main affectionate and policy-making roleit gives a divided up sense of psychological continuity to those living in a disenchanted world. You cannot do the same with the future, for the future has to be anticipated and it is more unvoiced to turn it into a manageable portfolio. Ultimately, Benedotte Croces aphorismall history is contemporary history can be applied to all true(a) futuristic enterprises, in addition. All visions of the future are interventions in and reconceptualisation of the present. My quickcheep into the future of India, therefore, can that be a comment on India today. I offer it in the spirit in which my work on Indias pasts, too, has all along been an attempt to work through or reimagine Indias present. The future of India in my point is intertwined with the future of diversity and self-reflection, ii values that have been substitution to the Indi an worldview, cutting across social strata, apparitional boundaries and pagan barriers.I believe that during the last two hundred years, there has been a full-scale onslaught on both these values. Even when some have upheld these values during the period, they have mostly done so instrumentally. Thus, however when they have talked of unity in diversity, the emphasis has been on the designer the latter has been seen as an artefact or a hard, somewhat unpleasant, human race with which we shall have to learn to live. A modern nation-state loves order and predictability and its Indian personification is no different. Sankaran Krishnas brilliant study of Indian intervention in Sri Lanka, Postcolonial Insecurities, shows that, even when the Indian state has gone to war in the observe of protecting cultural identities and minority rights, its tacit goal has been to advance the hegemonic ambitions 18of a conventional, centralised, homogenising nation-state. In repartee to the demand s of such(prenominal) a state, modern Indians too have learnt to fear diversity. That fear cuts across the inherent ideological spectrum and is ever increasing. Most Gandhians want an India that would conform fully to their idea of a soundly society, for they have begun to fear their marginalisation. The late Morarji Desai was a good example of such defensive Gandhism. But even some of the more imaginative Gandhians, the ones who cannot be acc procedured of being associated with the fads and foibles of Desai, have not been different.They have absolutised Gandhi the way limpidly ideologues can absolutise their ideologies. The impudent globalisers also have one solution for the entire world, though they some periods lazily mouth buzzwords like multiculturalism, grassroot and alternate(a) development. The goal of their pluralism is to ensure the transparency and predictability of other husbandrys and strains of dissent. Likewise, I have found to my surprise that attempts to prot ect ghostly diversity in assorted ways is not acceptable to most secularists. They want to fight the mono destinations of phantasmal fundamentalism and religionbased nationalism, just now feel aggrieved if othersdo so in other ways. They shadowed the permissiveness of those who are believers and trust the coercive apparatus of the state. Secularism forIn response to the demands of a centralised, homogenising nation-state, modern Indians too have learnt to fear diversity.such secularists serves the same psychological purposes that fundamentalism does for the fundamentalists it becomes a means of fighting diversity and giving playfulness to their innate authoritarianism and monoculturalism. Things have come to such a turn that we cannot now stand diversity even in the matter of names. Bombay has everlastingly been Mumbai, but it has also been Bombay for a long time and acquired a new set of associations through its new name. Bombay films and Bombay ducks cannot have the same ring as Mumbai films and Mumbai ducks. Nor can Chennai substitute Madras in expressions like bleeding Madras and Madras Regiment. some(prenominal) considerable cities like capital of the United Kingdom happily live with more than one name. Indeed, in the Charles De Gaulle Airport at Paris, you may miss a plane to London unless you know that London is also Londres. Until recently, we Calcuttans used to live happily with quaternion names of the city Kolikata, Kolkata, Kalkatta and Calcutta.Indeed, the first name is never used in conversations, yet you have to know it if you are interested in Bengali literature. In recent years, the city has been flirting with a fifth name, thank to former cricketer and cricket commentator Geoffrey BoycottCalcootta. But the Bengalis have bilk me. Many of them now are trying to ensure that there is only one name for the city, Kolkata. The gifted writer Sunil Gangopadhyay has joined them, because he feels that the Bengali language is under siege from deracinated Bengalis, Anglophiles and Bombayor is it Mumbaiya?Hindi. I am terror-struck the change will not provide any additional apology to the Bengali language. It will only fuel our national passion for sameness. MANUSHIIt is my principle that the ordinal century belongs to those who try to see diversity as a value in itself, not as an instrument for resisting new monocultures of the mind or as a compromise necessary for maintaining communal or ethnic harmony. Little cultures are in rebellion everywhere and in every sphere of life. Traditional healing systems, agricultural andecological practicesthings that we rejected disrespectuously as repositories of superstitions and retrogression have staged triumphant returns among the four-year-old and the intellectually adventurous and posing radical challenges to set ways of cerebration and living. More than a year ago, in the backyard of globalised capitalism, the US citizens for the first time spent more money from their pock ets on alternative medicine than on conventional healthcare.The idea of the diverse is not merely expanding but acquiring subversive potentialities. India of the future, I hope, will be central to a world where the idea of diversity will itself be diverse and where diversity will be cherished as an end in itself. By its cultural heritage, Indiathe civilisation, not the nation-stateis particularly well equipped to play a central role in such a world. However, the Indian elite and practically of the res publicas middle class seem keener to strut nearly the world stage as representatives of a hollow, regional super-power. They want their country to play-act as a poor mans America, armed to the teeth and desperate to repeat the success story of nineteenth-century, European, imperial states in the twenty-first century. India is also supposed to be a culture deeply pull to selfreflection. During colonial times, that No. 123commitment began to look like a liability. Many critics of In dian culture and civilisation in the nineteenth century lamented that the Indians were too engrossed in their inner life. Others argued that Indian philosophy had marginalised the materialist strain within it and become predominantly idealistic. Their tacit assumption was that the Indians were given to too oft of self-reflection and too dwarfish to action. We are dreamers, not doers came to be a popular, alter version of the same lament. Whether the formulation is correct or not, it is obvious that we have overcorrected for it. We have now become a country of unthinking doers. sure enough in the Indian middle classes, any action is considered better than doing nothing. As a result, mindless action constitutes an important ingredient of the ruling culture of Indian public life. Even the few knowledgeable, nongovernmental hydrologists who support mega-dams, readily adapt that most of the 1,500 large damsbuilt in India are inutile and counterproductive. Their main contribution ha sbeen to displace millions of people in the last fifty years. And even these supporters are not fully aware that the millions displaced by dams, often without any compensation, now constitute an excellent pool for those active in diverse forms of social violence and criminality. Veerappan, son of a dam victim, is only the most infamous symbol of them. Likewise, even in the Indian army, many aged officers now openly say that Operation Blue Star at the Golden Temple was worse than doing nothing. The price for that gratuitous intervention was a decade of bloodshed and brutalisation of Punjab. For years, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has been ventured as an excuse for every phoney, useless interventionin nature, society and culture in India. The last time I saw this ploy was when our bomb-mamas justified the nuclearisation of India in the name of Gandhi. The Indian middle 19classes have eternally been uncomfortable with the father of the nation and have always believed him to be romanti c, retrogressive, and antimodern. They have also probably all along felt slightly guilty about that belief. As a reparative gesture they have now begun to say, given half a chance, that Gandhi was a great doer he did not merely talk or theorise. This compliment serves two purposes. It allows one to ignore Gandhis uncomfortable, subversive thought as less relevant Bapu, you are far greater than your little books, Jawaharlal Nehru once s countenanceand it atones for ones hidden hostility and contempt towards the unconventional Gandhian vision of Indias future. Occasionally, some like philosopher T. K. Mahadevan have tried to puncture this selfcongratulatory strategy. I remember him once saying in a letter to the editor of The Times of India that GandhiFor years, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has been ventured as an excuse for every phoney, useless interventionin nature, society and culture in India. went out on the streets only twice in his life the rest of the time he was thinking. Such interventions are always explained away as esoterica vended by eccentric intellectuals and professional iconoclasts. The dominant tendency in India today is to discount all self-reflection. It has turned Indias ruling culture into an intellectually aseptic summation of slogans borrowed from European public culture in the 1930s. Our culture is now dominated by European ideas of the nation-state and nationalism, evenEuropeans ideas of ethnic and 20religious nationalism (mediated by that moth-eaten Bible of the 1930s, V. D. Savarkars Hindutva, modelled on the ideas of Mazzini and Herder). phantasm boxing with them for our benefit and entertainment are European ideas of radicalism and progress, smelling to high heavens of Edwardian England. In such a world, it is almost unrealizable to sustain a culture of diversity, particularly diversity as an end in itself. You learn to pay occasional h omage to diversity as an instrument that buys religious and ethnic calmness, but that is mai nly to hide ones eagerness to deploy such ideas of religious, caste and ethnic peace to further homogenise India. I have now learnt to fear the use of any cultural category in the singular. For years, I wrote about Indian civilisation. I thought it would be obvious from the contents of my writings that I saw the civilisation as a confederation of cultures and as an entity that coexisted and overlapped with other civilisations. After all, someother civilisations, such as the Iranian and the European, are now very much part of the Indian civilisation. The Islamic and Buddhist civilisations, too, clearly overlap significantly with the Hindu civilisation. However, even the concept of civilisation, it now seems to me, has been hijacked in India by those committed to unipolarity, unidimensionality and unilinearity. Our official policy has been shaped by a vision of India that is pathetically nave, if not farcical. It is that of a inferior European nation-state located in South Asia with a bit of Gita, Bharatanatyam, sitar and Mughal cuisine thrown in for fun or entertainment. Those who do not contend that idea of earthly paradise are seen as dangerous romantics,Our culture is now dominated by European ideas of the nation-state and nationalism, even Europeans ideas of ethnic and religious nationalism MANUSHIcontinuously jeopardising Indias national security. No wonder that even many erstwhile admirers of India have begun to see it as a nucleararmed, permanently enemy-seeking, garrison state. Edward Said will never know thatfew Occidentals can be as Orientalist towards India as educated, urban, modern Indians often are. In Indian public life, the standard response to such criticism is to reconceptualise Indian culture as some sort of a grocery store and to advocate that one should take from it the good and reject the bad. This is absurd and smacks of arrogance. Indian culture represents the assessments and experience of millions, acquired over generations. It has i ts own organising principles.My ideal India is a bit like a wildlife programme that cannot afford to protect only cuddly pandas and colourful tigers. transparent, because there cannot but be a touch of mystery in the world of cultures. My ideal India celebrates all forms of diversity, including some that are disreputable, lowbrow and unfashionable. It is a bit like a wildlife programme that cannot afford to protect only cuddly pandas and colourful tigers. It is an India where even the idea of majority is confined to political and economic spheres and is seen as shifting, plural and fuzzy, where each and every culture, however tame or humble, not only has a place under the sunlight but is also celebrated as a vital role of our collective life. That may not turn out to be an give up dream. I see all aroundme movements and activists unashamedly rooted in the local and the vernacular. They are less defensive about their cultural roots and are working to empower not merely local co mmunities, but also their diverse systems of knowledge, philosophies, art and crafts. Underlying these efforts is a tacit celebration of everyday life and ordinary citizens. Everything in everyday life and sophistication is not praiseworthy and many of these efforts seem to me harebrained, pigheaded or plain silly. But they represent a generation that is less burdened by nineteenth-century ideologies masquerading as signposts to a new era and at least some of them show the capacity to look at human suffering directly, without the aid of ornate, newly imported social theories. Ashis Nandy is Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of evolution Societies.Diversity, to veer as diversity, must allow those who represent the diversity to be diverse in their own ways, according to their owncategories, not ours. It cannot be used like an array of commodities at the mercy of casual purchasers. Diversity, to qualify as diversity, must allow those who represent the diversity to be diverse in t heir own ways, according to their own categories, not ours. We shall have to learn to live with the discomfort of seeing people using these categories, even when they are not fully transparent to us. For the true tolerance of diversity is the tolerance of incommensurable multiple worlds of culture and systems of knowledge. In this kind of tolerance, there is always the assumption that all the cultures covered by the idea of plurality are not and need not be entirely No. 123MANUSHIhandsomely Bound in Maroon Leather in Nine Volumes legal injury for India, Nepal and Bangladesh Vol. I Vol. II Vol. III Vol. IV Vol. V Vol. VI Vol. septet Vol. VIII Vol. IX Nos. 1 to 19 (1979 to 1983) Nos. 20 to 37 (1984 to 1986) Nos. 38 to 49 (1987 to 1988) Nos. 50 to 61 (1989 to 1990) Nos. 62 to 73 (1991 to 1992) Nos. 74 to 85 (1993 to 1994) Nos. 86 to 97 (1995 to 1996) Nos. 98 to 109 (1997 to 1998) Nos. 110 to 121 (1999 to 2000) Postage in India Rs 30 per volume All Other Countries US$ 60 per volume (including air-mail postage) tear payment by cheque, draft or MO payable to Manushi Trust.