INDIA AND PAKISTAN: QUEST OF SELF
BY BASUDHA CHAKRAVARTY
The
horizon lay blue before India and Pakistan as they emerged on August 15, 1947
into independence. India had risen out of struggle against foreign rule;
Pakistan had not been established without a civil convulsion. The background of
India’s independence was different from that of Pakistan’s self-creation. The
one derived from nationalist anti-imperialism, the other from religious
nationalism. Without India Pakistan would not have been possible, for
anti-imperialism was the pre-condition and it was only in fulfillment of the
pre-condition that religion could come into play. India would have been
possible without Pakistan; Pakistan would not have possible without the
independence of India. So it was Pakistan that forced itself into being. The
background has a direct bearing on the development of both as also their mutual
relation.
If
heredity and environment determine the characters of men, they also influence
the pattern of States. They leave their imprint on the values of life the
community cherishes and wants to sustain India’s nationalism was confined to
anti-imperialism and without any positive content waiting to be given shape in
the National State. Not so Pakistan’s, however. It had arisen on the theory of
two nations based on religion. India did not admit the theory but could not
prevent Pakistan’s self-materialization according to it.
That
caused from the very start a difference between the courses of life on which
the two States faced their destinies. India faced fresh fields and pastures
new; Pakistan was called upon to discover itself from its basic being, Islam.
Both
were however caught in the social and administrative set-up they inherited from
the past rule. So the socio-economic pattern was the same in the two States,
barring the rather accidental fact that Pakistan’s economy was almost wholly
agricultural while India had a fairly wide industrial life, thus causing a
difference in emphasis between their respective problems. Rising capitalism
made an immediate attempt to take control of India’s political and economic
life and, despite the resistance, though feeble, of a Government influenced by
the all-embracing national outlook which brought them to power, refuses to let
go its grip. But as it is not within the power of capitalism to solve the
social problems of this age, its dominance is attended with evils like
profiteering and black-marketing that are heavily corroding the cohesive
essence of the national being. Yet banking on, the country’s urgent need for
industrial expansion, capitalism rules the roost almost to the point of
black-mail. The middle and lower classes are involved in sufferings which
palliative measures have not yet been able to redeem. Sufferings lead to
struggle, and when hope for relief inspires a struggle, says Trotsky,
revolution occurs. Meanwhile struggle is necessarily animated by a new outlook
on life. Political terms like socialism and communism would very inadequately
describe the comprehensive content of hankering for a fuller life that
unrealized hopes out of independence have stressed. It is desire for a quality
of life that is essentially cultural. That quality cannot be attained within
the galling limitations of the present socio-economic order. The very desire
for an equitable social order prescribes fraternal equality as the guiding
conception of the life in view. It leads vaguely to a quest for values of life
that will be an escape from the grinding inadequacies of the present state of
being. The existing feudal-cum-capitalist order is however conscious of its
utter inadequacy in relation to what the people want. So now it belatedly seeks
to annex cultural values rooted in the irrevocable past which have so far been
requisitioned to bring into being a religious State. The tendency to coalesce
with the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, which represents an attempt to
perpetuate the core of medieval values in India’s national being, is indicative
of an effort to buttress the existing society by an appeal to the nostalgic
hankering in human hearts for the past. But just as a monarchy cannot be
established in India today, so the past cannot fill up the vacuum in the
present. The only result of reliance on obscurantism is a fillip to still
lingering communalism and this has assumed an all-embracing character. To prove
this it would be enough to mention the exclusion, contrary to the advice of
Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru, of the Urdu script from the national language
and the largely successful move to ban cow-slaughter even for Muslim religious
purposes.
Yet
it would not be true to say that that is all the dead end to which independence
has come. The liberal tradition of universalism, which nineteenth-century
contact with the West has left to us, still provides an escape from the
revivalist obscurantism that would pass muster as India’s abiding message. It
derived a dynamic quality from creative minds like Tagore. Independence has
landed it in such adventures as incorporation of Indian music into European
orchestra the bridging of the gulf so long presumed between Eastern melody and
Western harmony. Efforts at combined harmony have been
quite successful. But there are strong reasons to doubt if Indian society can
proceed far with creative effort, so long as it is caught up in economic
disequilibrium. Even if idea does not come wholly after reality, reality
impinges on idea, and then idea can at best derive out of struggle against
reality. Out of the struggle to conquer reality, art and literature might
emerge. Yet free and all-round national self-expression must await the removal
of the deadweight of economic distemper. As yet free India’s creative
self-expression remains in the realm or potentiality. Even the State is unable
to throw off the pre-independence niggardly attitude towards promotion of
artistic enterprise. The artists’ conference held under Government auspices has
not yet produced any concrete result.
India
thus gropes on her way to discovery of herself in the context of independent
life. Pakistan is engaged in the same quest but in an altogether different
direction, exemplifying the basis on which she has been formed. Pakistan tries
to build up her being in Islam–so much so that Eastern Pakistan is asked to
forget that she was a part of Bengal. “Nothing in common with non-Muslims,” is
the directive principle of Pakistan’s nation-building; but as yet it has only
negative results. It is sometimes facilely suggested that Islam is only a
catchword used by the present rulers of Pakistan to keep out all popular movements
and maintain themselves in power. That may be a fact; but that there is also a
genuine movement to re-discover Islam as a guiding principle of life is evinced
by popular trends of action including large public meetings, which were
formerly not so common, to explain the tenets of Islam on the occasion of the
Prophet’s birthday. There is however nothing concrete to show that the lives of
Pakistanis have derived any new content from the age-old concept of Islam.
Meanwhile the Pakistani has to live in the day-to-day world and can hardly go
back to the classic Islamic way of life. The subjective inclination to
solidarity within Islam runs up against the exigencies of modern conditions of
life, which have as much created class differences as they have caused
individual lives to depart from orthodox Islamic standards. Pulled between
these contrary forces Pakistan is hardly sure of its way to any sustaining
values of life. Eastern Pakistan for example pins her faith on the folk-lore in
which she possesses an old popular culture. But there are no particular Islamic
traits about it; nor is there any indicative of any cultural development based
on it, deriving any particular Islamic content, except in the sense of
expression of the lives of the Muslim masses. Unable to find any positive
content Pakistan’s self-centred consciousness lends itself to
anti-Indian communalism, which in its turn strengthens tendencies in India
towards obscurantist revivalism. Past politics lies heavily on the mass
consciousness of both countries and inhibits self-assured endeavour for
creative self-realization in the world currents of thought. To Pakistan however
it gives some solidity of purpose reflected in cautious but determined national
policies. It is less operative in India, if only because she thinks less in
terms of communal solidarity, with the result that there is a conflict between
organized conservatism and progressive universalism. There is no gainsaying
however that, without integration with modern arts and science, neither will
realize her national being. That remains still a process at once consciously
retarded and struggling through natural impulse.
Life
however is complex, and the chances are that nothing like an evolution to order
will be vouchsafed to Pakistan or be successful in India. The pristine purity
of Islam disappeared after the first five Khalifs, and the democratic
organization it laid down for the faithful has nowhere been evident since. The
laws of historical development have indeed proved too strong for that. They
will similarly override the tendencies in India for repose in medievalism. For
the human struggle for better living incessantly adds to the feelings and
experiences of the individual as well as of the mass of people. Feelings and
experiences are always the background of cultural endeavour, and the struggle
to get out of the intense social disequilibrium that inhibitive feudalism and
ill-balanced capitalism have created, may itself supply the incentive for
cultural self-expression.
Meanwhile
however there is no mistaking the calculated effort of conservatism, which
shields also social vested interests, to maintain itself by nostalgic
obscurantism. Such an effort can have no progressive content in this age, and
all it does is to foster communal clashes and, what is worse, sadistic communal
torture on religious minorities. The more pronounced it is, the clearer becomes
the disintegration of present social order and the present society’s inability
to supply what would be real spiritual content of life. So while India gropes
her way towards extended self-expression, she is disabled from finding it by
the forces of retrogression in her social setting, and she is not likely to
find it except in an elastic social order and the struggle to reach it. Pakistan
will yet awhile want to strike its roots in Islam while an under-current of
disillusionment already disturbs her. Both will undergo mighty social
revolutions through which the cultural values of a renewed life will emerge and
they will perhaps then, and not before, find the mutual adjustment that is
inherently lacking today in the very basis of their being. That both the
countries have reached the climax of a cultural crisis is apparent on the face
of it. Conceptions of life’s sacredness, woman’s honour, minimum decencies in
conduct, have all been submerged under the stresses of medieval obscurantism
which aspires to fill the vacuum created by departed imperialism and collapsing
feudalism, while industrialization is not sufficiently advanced to modernize the
people’s attitude and outlook. The total breakdown of the culture reared on a
feudal society that has reached only the slummy fringe of industrialism, is
apparent the background of inter-communal conflict which passes, even in its
sordid present form of oppression on the minorities, for war, and supposed to
excuse the gravest sins and crimes–a sense of values itself indicative of total
moral exhaustion. A cynical despair coupled with abstract humanism is the total
content of cultural effort to get out of the rut. Nothing more is yet possible,
for life itself is still groping for a path. It is the life of the people and
they will decide. “Everything springs from the people,” said Gustave Flaubert.