TO
MODERN MASS SOCIETY
B.
VENKATAPPIAH
Formerly
Deputy Governor, Reserve Bank of India
This
article is confined to Indian, more specially Hindu, society. It tries to
assess the process of change going on in this society from the point of view of
new needs and old values.
Caste and Rural
Structure
The Indian village is by no means the homogeneous entity it is sometimes imagined to be. It has classes as well as castes. It has the landed and the landless; the rentier, the tenant and the labourer; the cultivator and the artisan; the petty official, the landlord, and the money-lender; and so on.
Class,
caste and occupation are usually inter-related and therefore caste plays a very
important part in the social and economic structure of the village.
While
the persistence, rigidity, and ubiquity of caste, make the institution peculiar
to India, comparable divisions of society are, of course, not unknown in other
countries, especially of the East. The divisions are hereditary, often
specialise in some one occupation, and rarely marry outside the group. What
distinguishes India is that all society can be so divided, that the divisions
are numerous and that in origin at any rate, if not in present operation, they
can be fitted into one integrated framework which is at once social, religious
and traditional. It is these divisions or sub-castes which should be studied in
the context of a transition from one set of social purposes and objectives to
another.
According
to one estimate, there are (or at one stage were) some 3,000 sub-castes in
India. Each of them is an endogamous group with prohibitions not only against
inter-marriage (strictly), but also against inter-dining (not so strictly),
with members of other groups. These in a sense are the real castes, for their
classification into the four main occupational groups of Brahmin (priest),
Kshatriya (warrior), Vaisya (merchant) and Sudra (worker)
is more a logical than sociological categorisation.
But
underlying the relationship between all these groups and sub-groups, castes and
sub-castes, is an integrating principle based on the religion and traditional
values of the Hindus. Implicitly, if not explicitly, the social organisation is
knitted together for the preservation of these objectives and values. The
sanctions are social and religious, while the values and the culture are
reinforced by song, dance, myth and legend carried to the doors of every
individual family within each relevant division of the organisation.
Traditional Values
What
are the traditional values which may be regarded as specifically Hindu? Any
attempt to set them out briefly must, of course, involve a large amount of
over-simplification. It would also raise the question whether the values are
shared by a large number of people, illiterate and educated, rural and urban.
It is very necessary to make one clarification at this stage. The values of the
religion and philosophy of the Hindus are far from being confined to a small
coterie, priestly, learned or other. Mass communication has operated through
the centuries and throughout the country. Indeed, the illiterate farmer in the
village, and the uneducated grandmother in the family, often know more about
the saints and their deeds, the philosophers and their concept than the
educated town-dweller or westernised businessman. Few who know India will
dispute the statement that some of the most abstruse schools of philosophy such
as advaita (non-dualism) are by no means unfamiliar ground to the Indian
villager. Moreover, whether villager or townsman, the temperament of the Indian
has throughout the awes responded readily to saintliness of character. This
does not, of course, mean that the average Indian is either more spiritual or
more ethical than the rest of the world. A man may be no more moral than his
neighbour, and indeed may be worse; but when it comes to what moves him most,
the answer might be: not a successful businessman, not a great commander, nor
even a great politician, but one who has renounced for the sake of helping
others. This may be no more than a feature of the temperament but it is an
important feature and has to be taken in any assessment of
the values held dear by Hindu society as a whole.
The
emphasis is first of all on individual liberation (mukti). Man is part
of the same process as brought forth the universe. Being part of the process he
shares in some measure the nature of the creative force behind creation, just
as, being part of the result of the process, he partakes of the nature of manifested
creation. Far from being a stranger in a world he has not made, he is himself
the maker, himself the world. His religion teaches him that progress involves
not only a direction but a starting point. His starting point is himself. He is
what he is today because of his past. But he is infinitely perfectible and
perfection consists in that full development of his spiritual faculties which
will make him in some ineffable way once more a part of the creative force of
the universe. This is mukti which is both his goal and his destiny.
Since
the starting point is himself his religion depends on himself. The approach to
progress must be pragmatic. If he is emotional, it will be the way of bhakti;
if intellectual, the way of jnana, and if given to works, the way of
karma. There is no need to go out and seek a formula of salvation; the
sect or religion in which he is born is good enough; all that is necessary is
that he practise his particular religion to the utmost.
Since
all men will ultimately be liberated, all men are potentially equal. If they
start now at different points and have different handicaps, that is the result
of the past. It is the past that has determined their caste, their status and
their individual equipment, spiritual, moral and intellectual. One must be
practical and build upon this the best way one can. Sometimes the developed
spirit break through all these and a saint manifests himself whatever the caste
or the station. But that dose not nullify either the fact or the value of the hierarchy
of caste.
Dharma
or duty as it is loosely translated, has relation both to where one stands in
the universe and to the direction in which one has to proceed. It takes into
account the total environment of caste, parentage, inner qualities and so on.
But it is nevertheless in the final analysis intensely individual. Granted the
reality of a spiritual goal, what should one do in a given situation so as to
proceed towards and not away from the goal? The milieu and the moment are no
less internal than external to man. These being given, what he ought to do
constitutes the dharma of the man.
The
values which the Hindu must prize are partly those which go with his station in
life, such as courage if a warrior, austerity if a Brahmin and so on. There are
others which are universal. Among the most important of these are tolerance,
detachment and loving-kindness. Since men are situated differently and are
bound to progress differently there must be tolerance for all. One has to act,
but the results of action are not important. One must be detached in one’s
attitude towards results. Since all men are united in origin and united in
destination, one must have an attitude of equal-mindedness (same buddhi)
towards all. This applies not only to human beings but to all living things and
indeed to all created things.
Some
of the implications of these attitudes, however noble or pariseworthy in
themselves, are not difficult to see. The tolerance can become mere passivity;
the detachment, indifference, and the loving-kindness, sentimentality. Most
important of all, the emphasis on individual development and liberation,
coupled with the small group within which social loyalties are exercised, may
result in the lack of a social purpose and a social philosophy, as distinguished
from the merely religious and ethical. It would seem that at different stages
in India’s long history something like this has indeed happened. Equality at
the philosophical level has not meant social equality, much less the positive
aim of readjusting economic inequalities. It is also a comparatively new thing
for Indians to think in terms of economic objectives as worthwhile goals
in themselves, not only for individuals but for society as a whole. To work
with one’s hands to produce, to organize production for the community, to take
pride in increase in production, all these are values which are only slowly
being adopted.
We have here then the
picture of a society hierarchical in structure. Each part of the structure is
fitted into the whole with what would seem an underlying purpose basically
connected with the objectives and values of the Hindu religion. The sanctions
which preserve the structure and its individual parts are primarily social and
religious. It is this structure that has now to be geared to socio-economic
values instead of purely religious ones. It is to be actuated by new
objectives, hitherto foreign to it, such as individual liberty, economic
welfare and social justice. There is no use slurring over the fact that these
are indeed new values and objectives for which the historical development of
the structure had not prepared it. At the same time, on the credit side, it has
to be recognised that the philosophical concepts of the tradition are in no
sense, and at no point, antagonistic to these values. Indeed, on their own
plane they may be said to be complementary to the new socio-economic objectives
of plentitude and equality.
Another
point may be mentioned. Hindu philosophy and religion are uniquely consistent
with the most modern trends in science. The Hindu need have no dichotomy of
mind, one of blind faith and the other of rational thought. He is brought up to
believe that the material and the spiritual grow out of one another and that he
himself partakes of the nature of both. There is no specific formula which he
is asked to adopt as part of his belief. There is spiritual reality around him
even as there is physical reality. It is up to him to understand the laws of
both and in conformity with those laws, strive for self-fulfilment. Since the
moral laws of development and the physical laws of process are derived from the
same reality, at no point of time can there be an irreconcilable inconsistency
between the two. Nor, a universe so integrated, can one in being true to oneself
the danger of being false to some one else.
But
even if one has succeeded in discovering the moral or spiritual laws of
individual development (as in the principles of yoga), what about the
corresponding laws which govern society? Individual dharma may be all right,
but in a world of social groups may it not prove to be as national as a point
in three-dimensional geometry? Is there no need in the modern world to pursue
the complementary line of enquiry and discipline which concerns social dharma
and institutional dharma as distinguished from individual dharma? And if the
spiritual world is worthy of study because the physical world is implicit in
it, is not the physical world as worthy of study because the spiritual world is
implicit in it? Briefly the Hindu has yet to realise that the values of his
philosophy are in tune with only a part of the infinite; and that the parts to
which it is yet to be attuned are precisely the ones which the modern
mind has most explored and to which modern development is most beholden, namely
the relationship between man and the universe which has given rise to the
physical sciences, and the relationship between man and men which has
given rise to the social sciences.
Trends
No one can hope to discern the contours of the
future without looking back at the formations of the past. In India’s long
history there have been rebels against priestly monopoly, reformers of religion
and society, and re-interpreters of those values and loyalties which transcend
sect, caste and occupation. The greatest of them all was Buddha; but he is only
the most outstanding peak of a whole range of heights which never ceases
through the centuries down to the present day. The rebels and reformers were at
the same time saints or seers or the singers of the glory of God. Most of them
attempted to reconcile caste with human brotherhood at the spiritual, emotional
or philosophical levels. But there were signal exceptions like Basava (12th
century), himself a Brahmin, who hoped to get immediate and practical results.
He founded in the South an important
sect which disowned the Brahmin. Basava tried to abolish caste through
inter-marriage but found the forces arrayed against him much too strong. In the
14th century Ramananda (North India) sang:
“Jati
panthi puchchai nahi koi
Hari
ko bhaje to Hari ka hoi”
(Let
no one ask a man’s caste or with whom he eats. If a man is devoted to Hari
(God) he becomes Hari’s own.)
Kabir,
the weaver also of the North, whose songs of the fifteenth century move men and
women throughout India up to this day, said in one of his compositions:
“I
have forgotten both caste and lineage...
I
have given up both the Pandits and Mullahs…..
From
neither have I received advantage...
My
heart being pure, I have seen the Lord:
Kabir
having searched and searched himself
hath
found God within him.”
There may also be cited
Sankaradeva whose work for the re-establishment of the worship of God and
affection for all men, had a tremendous impact on Assam during the latter part
of the 15th and the earlier half of the 16th centuries.
Vemana, the Telugu poet of the South, whose poems have passed into proverbs,
said in the 16th century:
“Food
or caste or place of birth
Cannot
alter human worth
Empty
is a caste-dispute
All
the castes have but one root.”
Also
in the 16th century lived Eknath of Maharashtra whose practice of the equality
of men is remembered today not only through his songs but in the many legends
handed down about his life. Examples can be multiplied of this philosophical
and individual rejection of caste by seers and teachers throughout the
centuries. It will suffice to give one more quotation. This is from
Narayana Guru of Kerala who died in 1928 and whose teachings and following
today constitute one of the strongest ethical forces in that State:
“One
of kind, one of faith, and one in God is man;
Of
one womb, of one form, difference herein none.
The
community of man thus viewed to a single caste belongs.”
The
trend I have illustrated was not only indigenous but presented the reaction to
something, viz., caste, which was internal to the structure itself. It is
necessary to consider another of reactions namely those which originated in
response to the impact of a strong foreign culture, the one which the British brought
with them to India in the form of western thought and literature and political
forms. Some four or five stages can I think, be discerned in the reaction of
Hindu society to this tremendous impact. It might seem fanciful, but it was
almost as if the awakening took place by degrees and that different centres of
the dormant culture came back to awareness one after another.
Chronologically
the influence of the West was first felt in Bengal, for Calcutta was the
capital of India and English education a significant scale was earlier
organized there than elsewhere the country. To start with, there was complete
absorption in the culture of the rulers. Educated Indians adopted and imitated
that culture in all its aspects, spiritual, literary, and so forth. This soon
gave way to a positive reaction against the foreign culture. The first
awakening that took place was in what one might describe as the spiritual layer
of the country’s consciousness. Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Devendra Nath Tagore (the
Poet’s father) and others exemplified this earliest phase of spiritual
awakening of India’s self. Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and others continued and
completed the process in later years.
Meanwhile
the second phase of the reaction had already begun. Indians were no longer content
to imitate the literary forms of England and write verses and novels in a
foreign language. The languages of the people, each of which had a rich
heritage behind it, began to assert themselves. The second phase of the
reaction was literary. Rabindranath Tagore was a good example of this phase. It
must be remembered that he wrote in Bengali and the songs, many of them still
untranslated, are sung by villagers in all parts of Bengal.
The
third phase was social. Social reform became the slogan of the day. Questions
such as caste, untouchability, remarriage of widows, pre-puberty marriage of
girls, and so forth assumed great importance. Educated Indians began to say
that they should first reform their own society before entertaining political
aspirations for responsible Government. “Should social reform or political
reform come first?” was a favourite topic for debate in schools and colleges
and the answer usually was “social reform.”
The
fourth phase of the reaction was definitely political. Tilak, Gandhi and those
who followed were typical of this phase. Without independence, it was asserted,
nothing could be achieved not even social reform. Indians must be their own
masters, and from the self-respect this created everything else would follow.
Yet here again, as particularly under Gandhi, the political struggle took a
uniquely indigenous form, that is to say, a shape that was deliberately moulded
after the thoughts and aspirations of Hindus in particular and Indians
generally. Intolerance for the foreign rule was to be combined with tolerance
for the foreigner. There was to be neither hatred nor anger against him. Gandhi
also insisted on ahimsa and non-violence though this was perhaps a
Buddhist or Jain idea rather than a specifically Hindu one. The Gita
teaches the pursuit of duty without desire for the fruits of action. And in the
Hindu context this pursuit might well be violent as in the instance of Arjuna
himself. It was Jainism and Buddhism that emphasised non-violence as an
absolute virtue. Thereafter the ideal did get interwoven, though the strands
still show here and there, into the texture of Hindu thought and belief. Thus
it was that Gandhi, deriving inspiration from his own culture and support from
Christianity and Tolstoy, put ahimsa in the forefront of his political
struggle.
The
fifth phase commenced some years ago. From the spiritual, the literary, the
social and the political, the stage now reached may be described as the
awakening of the economic consciousness of the country. War, Independence and
Planning, all these have combined to bring it about. More wealth is postulated
as the aim, but along with it and not less important, better and more equitable
distribution of wealth. There is thus for the first time, in India, a
recognition of the social and economic objectives of what might be very broadly
described as a Welfare state. It is no longer mukti or individual
salvation which will suffice. The basis if no longer the individual, but the
group and society. The explicit objective is economic good, and no longer–or at
any rate not necessarily–spiritual good.
This
last phase of all, the phase of economic development and equalitarianism, is
also the most difficult. It poses issues which India has evaded throughout its
long development. It raises problems of production and distribution which, for
the time being at any rate, are more clamant in India’s villages than in its
cities and towns. The production of more wealth is easy enough when it takes
the form of a textile mill or a steel mill or even constructing a big
irrigation dam or a hydro-electric project. If sufficient initial help is
forthcoming from abroad, in machinery mainly, and skills secondarily, can take
all this and much more in its stride. Undoubtedly will be many and by no means
insignificant difficulties; but they will by and large add up to something
which, though not resolved, is yet familiar, namely, the problem of
readjustment of labour to urban conditions. Arising from this will be the major
issue of decentralisation of industry: the question of taking industry to where
the worker is situated–the small town and the village–rather than the worker to
where the industry is situated. One is hardly entitled to assume that such
decentralisation can happen on any large scale, for limits are set by technical
feasibility and the economics of scarce capital. Nevertheless, it is a vital
issue and needs study and investigation with specific reference to Indian
conditions. But the main problem, the one which concerns the bulk of the
population, will still remain, namely, how the underfed and the
underprivileged–the small cultivator in his millions and the small
industrialist in his hundreds of thousands–can be given the know-how, the
resources and the incentive to produce more. The know-how perhaps presents the
least difficulty. National Extension, Community Development, Small Industries
service institutes, all these have been fairly successful in organizing and
passing on the know-how, though it is true that a great deal has yet to be
done. In particular, it will be education itself, i.e., the conversion of the
illiterate into the educated–not the unskilled into the skilled–that is the big
task still to be completed. Along with this lack of education, then, must be
taken the other main impediments, which are lack of incentive and lack of
resources.
The
question may now be put: how are these three lacks being met, viz., lack of
education, lack of incentive and lack of resources, all of which stand directly
in the way of increased production? On the answer to this question, more than
on anything else, will depend the effectiveness of India’s transition from a
traditional to a modern mass society. But the question, of course, cannot stop
there. We shall further have to ask whether in the process of meeting these
requirements:
(1)
the weak and the underprivileged are being helped;
(2)
bridges are being built across the old divisions of caste and
sub-caste; and
(3)
traditional values such as tolerance, non-injury and reverence for the
other-worldly are not losing their importance.
The
problem is by no means simple. For one thing, it is not posed in the manner
stated above by many of those who are most concerned with its different
aspects, namely, the politician and the legislator, the planner and the
administrator, the educationist and the social worker. Nevertheless, one can
observe trends and, however faint these may be for the moment, one can try and
pick up from among them such as seem significant for the future. One may start
with almost any of the aspects mentioned above. Caste for
example, evokes different responses from different sets of people. There are
those who in effect exploit caste to gain temporary ends. Others ignore it or
pretend it does not exist. Still others believe it will vanish under the impact
of economic forces. Lastly, there are those who realise both the strength and
ubiquity of caste divisions and seek to establish newer loyalties across,
instead of along them.
An
obvious example of exploitation of the existing divisions is what
happens during elections. The candidate may not always have
willed it to be so, but it is common knowledge that in most elections the
voting tends to take place along the lines of caste. In other words, caste, as
one of the strongest existing loyalties, is something which no electioneering
agent is likely to lose sight of.
There
are those who ignore caste or believe that it will succumb to economic forces.
They minimise the problem. It is true that the forces of economic development,
including urbanisation, are on the whole hostile to caste. Broken up into
individual elements, the loyalties of caste are principally sectarian,
territorial and occupational. The hold of sectarian religion is getting less in
the towns but not necessarily, nor on any appreciable scale, in the villages.
Territorial loyalty counts for less in the villages and much less in towns than
in the past. But there is a vicious circle. Caste restricts the mobility of the
society; lack of mobility keeps people at home in their of occupations; and
those who remain at home tend to have a stronger territorial loyalty than
others. The same remarks apply to occupational loyalty. In all these respects,
therefore the old loyalties of caste and sub-caste are only slowly weakening
and it is by no means clear that they will disappear with the mere efflux of
time and economic change.
Those
who ignore caste, instead of recognising it and dealing with it, are doing a
disservice. This applies to those who believe not only that the village can in
due course be made into a homogeneous entity but that it is one here and now.
They read into the village community a social cohesion and a common purpose
which ought to be created, but which quite often are not there today. The
fallacy involved in this attitude is dangerous because it may lead the
administration to impose schemes of welfare on the village in the expectation
that its leadership has the same interests at heart as the small farmer, the
landless labourer and the Harijan. Where this is not the case, a well-meaning
scheme may lead to greater exploitation along the lines of caste by those who
are more powerful in the village. The result will be an accentuation, not a
reconciling of differences.
There
is no alternative but to make positive, purposeful and persistent efforts to
build bridges; to create new loyalties or invoke traditional loyalties which
transcend these divisions. Such efforts are in fact being made; many of them
are humble and obscure; some are well known, while still others have to be
brought to light from between the covers of official records and publications. A
few of them may be cited. The illustrations are also
concerned with the three lacks I have mentioned before, viz., education,
incentive to produce and resources for production.
In
regard to education; I will confine my illustration to
one of many pioneers in different parts of India who during the last fifty
years, and more especially after Independence, have rendered signal service in
this field. I refer to an educationist* of Maharashtra, who before his death a
few years ago succeeded in giving schools to the rural area on a scale which
neither Government nor school boards had achieved in the past. What is more
important, he was able to get Harijan and high-caste boys to live, work and
study together. At a very early stage in the experiment, he abandoned the idea
of having separate hostels for Harijan boys. Ignoring the divisions of caste,
sub-caste and, outcaste, he postulated poverty as the line of demarcation and
said that every poor student in the countryside would be the beneficiary of his
scheme. He also insisted on the contribution of voluntary labour by his
students and maximum self-help on the part of each particular area. In this way
he built schools and hostels which for both number and usefulness are today
among the most significant institutions in western India. In these
institutions, which include about 200 primary schools and a dozen or more
boarding houses, the experiment is being successfully tried of students
habitually and purposefully ignoring the divisions of caste and recognising the
uniting factors of poverty and self-help. This remarkable man was rooted in the
soil, had an essentially religious outlook, and renounced wealth in the best Indian
tradition. Examples can also be cited from other parts of
the country of the attempt to organize education as a unifying force. These
attempts are usually not all-India. They are indigenous to the area or the
State and have done much to spread literacy in the language of each particular
region. And it must be remembered that for each of the big States of India as
they exist today, its own language and literature are great unifying forces
which cut across the barriers of rank, caste and occupation.
Incentive
for production explains much of the agrarian legislation which after
Independence has taken place in India. Feudal tenures have been abolished,
rents have been regulated, ceilings are being placed on what a landlord may own
and ‘land to the tiller’ has been the formula generally adopted by State
Governments. What is laid down in the statute is not necessarily what takes
place in the field. Allowing for evasion and non. fulfilment the fact still
remains that it has been possible to bring about a radical re-adjustment of
agrarian rights without recourse to violence.
Another
development, and one directly in keeping with India’s traditional values, is
the mission undertaken by Vinoba Bhave to receive gifts of land (‘bhoodan’) for
distribution to the landless and, if all the land of the village was gifted
(‘grarndan’), to place it under the management of the village council for the
benefit of all. The whole world is watching this experiment which, from the
point of view here set out, constitutes one of the most significant endeavours
in India for bridging the differences of caste and class and community. It has
not yet touched the town and the city. The saint’s appeal is to persons. In the
villages of India today one still deals with persons. In cities and towns the
individual is merged in the impersonal masses. There is big business, not the
individual trader; big banks and not money-lenders; and large ownership of
capital, not just a handful of landlords. Also people are much more hardened
against the traditional values of life. This perhaps explains why Vinoba Bhave,
in his attempt to employ an essentially religious technique for bringing about
social and economic justice, has hitherto avoided the cities of wealth and
citadels of power and confined his mission to the village. Another observation
may be made. The re-distribution of lands, however motivated, is in the end a
concrete administrative process. It requires supporting legislation,
administrative staff and legal documents in which intentions
are reduced to enforceable form as in any other administrative measure, whether
such measure emanates from a saint or a secretariat. Will India be able to show
that the saint and the Secretariat can work together? The question is still
open.
My next
illustration is in fact taken from Government. It concerns the policy of
State-partnership in co-operatives for the purpose of meeting the last of the
requirements I have mentioned, namely resources or captial. Lacking these, the
village co-operative, whether credit or marketing, is powerless against the
competition of landlord, money-lender and trader. Yet it must be rendered
strong in order that the small producer’s interests are looked after and
production as an aim is promoted. Lacking initial momentum the weak society
falls back to ground; there has to be a force which will help it to get into
orbit after breaking through a whole field of gravitation. In India the
experiment is being tried of supplying this initial force through
State-partnership. The partnership is reversible; also it does not imply State
interference. Since the society starts strong, it is in a position to render
service at the very commencement; people will test it for a little while and
then increasingly come in and buy shares; this will in due course enable the
society to buy off Government’s shares. This has not only been the theory but
the practice as well. And so far as one can judge, it appears to work. But the
points I am concerned to make are these. India has not chosen the path of liquidating
the money-lender and the landlord in order that their hold may disappear or
competition cease. That would have been wholly repugnant to temperament and
tradition. Nor has it thought it right, on the one side, that the State should
run these institutions itself or on the other, thus the weak should be left to
their own devices. My illustration, then, concerns a joint attempt of the State
and the people, especially the weaker sections, to institutionalise services of
great importance for production; and to do so in a manner which conforms both
to the values of tradition and the principles of sound organization.
One
other aspect remains to be noticed. Built on the basin of State-partnership
there is a large number of producers’ co-operatives today–such as sugar
factories owned by the cane-growers or lift irrigation societies run by the
riparian farmers–which infusing a new type of loyalty, the loyalty of
production, across the older stratification of caste. The producers are of many
castes; but they combine in order to increase their
production or to process their produce for market; they have no problem, as in
a credit society, of apportioning scarce resources (often along the lines of
caste or other extraneous loyalties); their status is purely that of producers;
it is as producers that they put forth a common effort and it is as producers
that they derive a common benefit. This again is a very significant way in
which the newer co-operatives, with assistance from the State, are helping to
build bridges across the old divisions and are doing so in the very context of
modernising the methods of production, processing and preparation for the
market.
Conclusion
How
can India, without losing anything of value in her ancient traditions, adapt
herself to the modern context of efficient production, economic welfare and
social justice? The transition is taking place. It is largely uncharted. I am
conscious that in pointing to a current here and a current there I have given
no answer to the question itself. It seems permissible to doubt whether a
definitive answer can in fact be given. If there is no chart of the transition,
there can be no blue print of the future. But there is one thing which, in
accordance with one’s own predilections, it may be possible to indicate and
that is the spirit in which India, if true to her traditions, ought to conduct
the transition. I quote from the Rural Credit Survey Report.
“...Assuming
this larger purpose to have the twofold aspect of achieving wealth and securing
its equitable distribution, programme...becomes inseparable, in its under-lying
concepts, not only from the end which is economic good but from means to be
employed in the attainment of the end. Those means, to be significant for
India, have to connform to the values of the Indian tradition. One feature of
that tradition may be recalled. At widely different times and in widely
different parts of the country there have arisen religious leaders in India
whose aim was spiritual good and whose endeavour it was to place within the
reach of all the means of achieving such good. Each such effort was
non-violently conceived and non-violently conducted; it had the appeal and
motive force of a mission; and, not infrequently, its organization bore signs
of careful forethought and attention. Essentially the same means, employed in
the pursuit of economic good, have perhaps this difference, that they hold
greater promise of attaining the object postulated. For one thing, there is
nothing yet in human history to disprove–just
as there is nothing in it yet to demonstrate–that
economic welfare in its highest sense cannot be achieved, even where it is most
lacking, by the planned, deliberate and organized effort of a Government,
relentless as to purpose but not ruthless as to means, provided
the effort is not only emotionally impelled but is scientifically guided. In
this latter aspect a whole apparatus of technique, knowledge
and research comparatively recent and painstakingly accumulated, is available
to Governments, if only they will make use of it, through the development of
the social sciences of economics and sociology and of the science no less than
art of public administration. It is irrelevant whether economic good is or is
not a lesser objective than spiritual good. The fact remains that economic good
is the highest practicable objective so far as Governments are concerned. In
India, the process of increasing and more equitably distributing the economic
good must, on purely rational grounds, be conceived in terms of rural India.
The larger thesis … is that what India most needs today is a comprehensive and
determined programme of rural regeneration which has the ethical impulse and
emotional momentum of its highest traditions; which has, moreover, the
calculated design of a project that is scientifically conceived and
scientifically organized; and which, above all, attempts to render to rural
India, in the economic realm, those opportunities for growth and fulfilment
which, without distinction between man and man, but with especial compassion
for the weak and the disadvantaged, more than one religious leader at more than
one period of the country’s history attempted to render to the masses of India
in the realm of the spirit.”
* Bhaurao Patil; See
his biography by Dr. A. V. Mathew; “Karmaveer Bhaurao Patil”, Rayat
Shikshan Saustha, Satara, 1957,