OUR FREEDOM AND THE FUTURE

By BASUDHA CHAKRAVARTY

Humanity is the aggregate of nations and a nation is a conglomeration of individuals. The freedom of a nation connotes or ought to connote the freedom of each individual within it to perfect his personality. The extent of liberty of an individual to so perfect his personality is the measure of the freedom of the nation to which he belongs. Such liberty, it goes without saying, relates both to within and without. Internal inhibitions may detract from liberty no less than external restraints. Fascism is as much a bar to liberty as foreign domination.

This perfection of personality that men and women aim at has no less a spiritual quality than material. Man inherently wants to transcend himself, His life is a struggle to attain an abiding quality which has come to be called immortality. Modern materialism has launched a challenge against the conception of immortality. Yet it concedes that the fear of death which gives rise to the desire for immortality might itself give man his immortality, by making him dissolve himself in matter in utter self-abandonment. In its perfect form such self-abandonment would be best exemplified by the Buddha’s Nirvana or Gandhi’s self- identification with everything that lives. For matter alone is real, matter alone is immortal. To reach immortality man has to flow with the stream of life which has covered the thousands of

Years of human history and civilisation. To plunge oneself into that stream and consciously, howsoever minutely, regulate its flow is to attain immortality.

Starting from its base in the Himalayas, India settles down in the plains of Uttar Pradesh. The civilisation of which Upper India bears so many remarkable imprints is called upon to settle account with the still older civilisation of the South. Even at this moment the contest is evident on the question of a national language. Both are however confronted with the emotional stirs of alluvial Bengal, while tribal-cum migratory patterns of life present the North-Eastern State of Assam in a yet uncertain setting. Currents of thought–and now not only of thought but also of life and movement–filter down into the great country where for two hundred years medievalism hung on to foreign rule for perpetuation of itself beyond the period historically determined for it.

Medievalism has indeed taken a heavy toll. The price it has exacted for clearing the way for India to work out her path ahead has been heavy indeed. A deluge of blood has occurred and the Indian sub-continent has been divided on a basis of religious Nationalism which has really proved to be communalism raised to the status of Nationalism. India has not accepted the theory of two nations based on religion but had to agree to secession of Muslim-majority areas to form a separate State. Communalism now can remain, and actually remains, only as oppression of the minority community by the majority community. It has not ceased to exist in that form even in India; and that was why Pandit Nehru as President of the Congress was led in the last General Elections to lay prior emphasis on the eradication of communalism. That surprised not a few, and many thought that Pandit Nehru was overdoing the crusade against communalism. The rout of communalism in the elections was held to show that Pandit Nehru had been fighting a ghost. It is by no means certain however that the fight was not necessary for laying the ghost. It is again by no means certain that those who consider Pandit Nehru’s crusade against communalism uncalled for do not, at least subconsciously, wish him to leave their own communalism undisturbed.

The outcome of it all nevertheless constitutes the triumph of the spirit which made India reject the two-nation theory. Un-expected light has been thrown on this by a Pakistani paper. It is an evening daily of Karachi which has editorially thus commented:

“Pandit Nehru’s neutralism,–a state of mind which in terms of statecraft has come to be described as secularism, is the best effort that can be made towards changing the roots of India without quite uprooting a social polity which is steeped in the hoary past. If Nehru’s liberal school of thought gains a foothold on the otherwise tumultuous waters of Hindu revivalism, there is hope that the democratic concepts of Islam may have a more congenial atmosphere for their expression. With all our keen differences with and grievances against the Indian Prime Minister, our sympathies are entirely on his side.”

The paper then goes on to say:

“Two achievements have highlighted the career of Indian independence–the finalisation of the Constitution and the holding of the General Elections. Those perfectionists who conceive of life in categories of cast-iron rigidity might point to deep loopholes in the Indian Constitution, but the fact cannot be gainsaid that the Indian leadership has done what is required of any movement of reform, namely, to pronounce upon the principles of liberalism and democracy and enshrine them in the Constitution of the country….it is open to men of will and determination to put the flesh of reality on the skeleton and outline of their Constitution which has undoubtedly ushered a new era for India.”

“The second achievement which has drawn world-wide attention is the Elections. The sheer weight of the numbers involved is a phenomenon. It might be an exaggeration to say that this is a picture of democracy in action, for democracy is the fulfillment of certain concepts which can, if at all in a dynamic world, be achieved only in the course of time. Yet modern elections are the only practicable device which man has so far contrived to express the will of the people. A demonstration of that will is indeed a heartening promise of a people’s awakening and their resolve to participate in the ordering of their country. Moreover the fairness of the elections is noteworthy…..These elections have won immense credit to India. And apart from the power-politics of international relations, the USA has been particularly impressed by it.”

The paper then observes:

“The achievements are great. Yet history has, in the ultimate, returned moral verdicts on the career of a nation, however distant, impractical and abstract moral stands might appear in the din and noise of present-day life. When the contemporary chroniclers have done with the reasons and factors for the decline and fall of a people, country and regime, a, little later, from a detached position, history sums up the fall in a few morally fashionable phrases. ‘Now this day ye are rewarded with the doom of ignominy because ye were disdainful in the land without a right, and because ye used to transgress.’ Such moral reckonings are more relevant to an India whose great leader made out a damaging case against the British on the basis of simple principles of morality. And he won. More so, because Pandit Nehru’s role in shaping the future of his country, a country which can go to pieces in a conflict between the extremes of caste and class, depends on justice and truth rather than nationalism.”

The consummation of which the Pakistani journal speaks is, however, not a new destiny for India. It is eminently in accord with, and a fulfillment of, the synthetic trend of India’s history, of which paradoxically the best exemplification is the peak of the Muslim period, i.e., from Baburto Shahjehan. Fatehpur Sikri is the abiding representation of the synthesis of cultures represented by the tomb of a Hindu Yogi side by side with the abode of Begums. Northern India epitomises the synthetic trend of Indian history, in continuation of the impact of Aryans on the Dravidian civilisation which South India represents.

T. S. Eliot wrote sometime ago that culture could be saved in India either by letting the States develop their distinctive cultures in free conformity with the national being, or by enforcing a sort of rigid conformity. The latter course, he took care to add, was not at all feasible, for it would involve the elimination of classes and the abolition of religion which would be the end of culture itself–for religion, Eliot maintained, was the foundation of culture. A common religious background, he said, was essential for the development of culture. Conflict would be a hindrance to such development, and the two ways–really one–that he suggested were for resolving possible conflict.

Eliot also made the rather astonishing observation that partition of the country had removed the danger of cultural conflict. That should surprise many, not only as being support for partition from an unexpected quarter, but support based on exactly the same ground that protagonists of Pakistan most relied on. For India to admit this ground as valid would be to disown her national ideal which is in the present context connoted, as the aforesaid Pakistani paper has noticed, by secularism, India has never accepted the explanation of her communal problem in terms of supposed cultural differences between Hindus and Muslims. It may be over-simplification to ascribe the problem in terms of supposed cultural differences between Hindus and Muslims. It may be over-simplification to ascribe the problem to the manoeuvre of the imperialist third party that ruled the country. But that would be no justification for reading into it more meaning than is reasonable and in accord with facts judging the problem objectively, it may be recalled that the demand for Pakistan was a demand for a homeland for Indian Muslims. Scientifically speaking it was a demand of the rising Muslim middle class, under the aegis of the semi-feudal Muslim upper class, for a political and economic haven of their own. The demand had the support of the Muslim masses as well, for they had no other leadership than that of their own upper class to follow. Also they followed it willingly because the economic power which rested, because of historical reasons, largely in the hands of Hindus and was in its own nature oppressively used, could be and was shown in a communal light. That a politico-economic demand arose in a communal form needs to be accounted for. It is easily ascribable to the perpetuation of medievalism in our body-politic, due to industrialisation having been held over and modern scientific knowledge and outlook debarred from our national life, by foreign colonial rule. The consequent lack of a modern scientific outlook perpetuated communalism. The colonial ruling power was of Course too willing to take advantage of–and fan the flames of–communalism. But it would be giving communalism too much weight to ascribe it to cultural difference. Indeed no culture or, for that matter of that, no religion (Eliot says culture is derived of religion) would own to reacting on another culture in the way that led to admittedly one of the greatest barbaric cataclysms in history. Certainly no culture could be made responsible for the unspeakable inhumanity which communalism has inflicted on millions of this sub-continent.

Still culture in the classical sense is derived from religion, i.e., from a teleological view of life. Conflicts between outer forms and patterns of culture, arising out of different religions, could be and were often subdued under a stable politico-social order. Such an order prevailed during the rule of Babur to Shahjehan. Then the synthetic trend of our cultural history was continuous. Aurangzeb departed from that trend and his religio-cultural separatism was responsible for that loss of popular assent to his rule which steadily resulted in the decline of Mughal power in India. Hence Aurangazeb is considered an interlude in the history of India. The philosophy of separatism is now enshrined and embodied in the separate State of Pakistan. Secularism provides the constitutional set-up for India, to pursue and fulfill in her regained freedom her synthetic destiny.

It is not intended here to make any Chauvinistic claim on India’s behalf. For the sake of mere survival she has had to make a synthetic effort with the cultures and civilisations which a steady series of inroads and invasions have brought within her doors. Not many other countries have been historically similarly placed. Again it is not to be supposed that the synthetic individuality of Indian culture is something static or uniform for all time. Rather it is achieved by resolution, from age to age, of the conflict between the classical and popular trends of culture which are seen simultaneously running through Indian history. Classical Indian culture rests on Brahminism and would simply shut out all alien modes of thought. It is the summum bonum of Brahminical class ascendancy, tides of revolt against which have surged through history. These have brought with them floods of cultural fruition of which Buddhist art and architecture are the most solid example. Vaishnavite songs and literature rank next in order of popular self-expression in the wake of social revolution. There are other sectional forms of worship that are a living protest against the rigours of orthodoxy and have found exuberant release in song and dance. Politico-cultural conflicts like these are not India’s specialty, but they have been conspicuous in her varied historical context. Unorthodox and to some extent uncongenial cultural movements could not certainly have been assimilated except in the course of resolution of such conflicts.

In this process of assimilation in the history of India, the reign of Aurangzeb, as has been said before, has been described as an interlude. It was the anti-thesis of the whole trend and purpose of Indian history towards cultural assimilation. Yet it would be wishful to describe it merely as an interlude, i. e, an episode that is ended. Such an interlude would not have been possible except on the background of religio-culrural conflict and contradiction which Aurangzeb thought fit to sharpen rather than assuage. Again, had it been merely an interlude, there need have been no Pakistan. The establishment of Pakistan proves that seeds of dissension have continued to exist and operate and have sprouted into a State formed by the secession of Muslim-majority areas from the mainland. Even with the establishment of a separate State, however, factors of dissension have not ceased to exist. Rather, Pakistan is an embodiment of the gospel of dissension. But it has not incorporated unto itself all the separatism that was in the country. Separatism is evident even in India, in incidents not all of which are the making of any one community. Separatism results in communalism and finds expression, apart from specific incidents, in many a subtle way. In day-to-day behaviour and ordinary procedure in varied spheres of life, it not infrequently reveals itself.

On the political plane in India, however, communal separatism has, as the aforesaid Pakistani paper has observed, met with defeat. For, there it has no practical advantage to show. In the personal and social spheres, it may yet linger. But inasmuch as it is ceasing to be a collective force, it is losing its relation unto the broad purposes of life. At this stage, however, the broad purposes of life themselves do intervene. They seek out ways of expression and fulfillment, and in course of time transcend such unrealities as communalism. In the background, abiding values like humanism do exist and operate. The miracle in humanism that Mahatma Gandhi worked in riot-ravaged Calcutta in the wake of independence would, in the light of subsequent events, appear to be but a fleeting phenomenon. Yet it has been something of a permanent quality in men’s souls ever since. Lives were sacrificed in support of it, and not in vain. In its molecular working it has steeled the people’s subconscious minds against communal riots involving whole communities on a sort of war basis. Communal riots since then have been brought about by organisation, not in any spontaneous manner. It has since then not been possible to rally the whole population in support of communalism in which they had hitherto been actively or passively involved. The martyrdom of Mahatma Gandhi set the seal of permanence on the process of reclamation of Indian humanity from communalism. Gandhian humanism has been a great though subconscious factor in the triumph of secularism in the last elections.

The quest of a perpetual life is real and lends itself to the solace of hearing a good song. If communalism survives independence, despair at what this independence has meant is also inevitable. There is no easy way to fill in the resultant vacuum. Independence has been supposed to mean an opportunity for good living, good thinking, and freedom for human personality. Independence in that sense is far from being realised. So it reaches out to new paths, new endeavour. There is no clear-cut path either. Political parties offer their programmes, not all of which are genuine. At any rate they take time to derive reality out of practical and psychological integration with actual conditions of life. Men and women in the meantime have their problems to solve, their urges to satisfy. Very possibly it only results in frustration all round. The social and personal aberrations of which people are so often heard to complain these days, are a direct result. They nevertheless do not cloud the infinite quality of human desire. Social and cultural impacts from the outside world–and the world today is small, easily reachable–provide a ready though temporary outlet. For, except for minds integrated unto international movements of thought, they provide no day-to-day or permanent sustenance. Nor is more than a minute fraction of the population called upon to partake of the spiritual and intellectual entertainment thus available. In this the social iniquities are seen grossly at work. The major part of the population is stunted and starved. Social balance is lost. No wonder standards of life and society are all topsy-turvy. Social and moral values are admittedly at a discount. One feels one is not living. One feels one is dying. What avails freedom if one must die? One cries for immortality.

Secularism in India nevertheless sets the stage for a continued quest of freedom. Gandhian humanism is the beginning of an adventure into unexplored social and personal values. It has the power of filling the recesses of the human mind with infinite sympathy. But that has not yet proved sufficient for a complete philosophy of life. Therefore it is certainly not impossible that the country in its quest for freedom will take a plunge into Communism. Nothing is impossible, nothing yet is probable either. But the history of ages has been vindicated. The synthetic legacy of our forefathers has been preserved. The architects of independence have done their work. Their successors will take up the thread and carry on. Not indeed without a struggle, But that will be a struggle of evolution, not of reaction. The quest for freedom is on.

But what about the defeat registered by the synthetic spirit of India in the establishment of Pakistan? There is no denying that this defeat has been colossal. It has been the end of long cherished dreams of united India, the fading out of visions of united Indian nationhood. The defeat has been all the greater because it came with the suddenness of a shock. It would be unscientific and useless to ascribe it to the artificial machinations of a party or individual or–what would be greater over-simplification–a third party. The causes of this defeat were latent in the history of India, and were of course exploited by those who stood to gain thereby. When everything is said and done, however, the fact remains that the synthetic tradition of India failed the task of internal integration at the pour of withdrawal of foreign imperialism.

But if the quest for freedom continues in India, it has not stopped in Pakistan either. Pakistan has not proved to the summum bonum that those who wanted and realised it bargained for. The political set-up is as fluid as elsewhere, for, opposition to the ruling party is strong and growing. All it has attained so far is an administrative structure which alone cannot develop a national entity. A national entity can be formed only unto a common social and cultural purpose. Pakistan has not yet found any such purpose. Even the mutual integration of the two parts of Pakistan is far from complete. Nay, the unresolved contradiction between them has exploded into a tragedy over the question of a State language, Quite a number of East Bengal youths have given their lives to have Bengali recognised as one of the State languages of Pakistan. Many hundreds are in detention over the same issue. Yet the question has been left unsolved. Nor is there any clear answer to the query how the two wings of Pakistan will culturally assimilate each other in the course and by way of the much promised cultural self-fulfillment of that country. Present facts are the political domination of East Pakistan by West Pakistan and the total lack of cultural adjustment and understanding between the two. A common religion was formerly claimed to be the foundation of a common culture. But as it has clearly proved not enough, and as the Muslim world does not show even one example of solid mutual integration on the basis of a common religion, the evangelists of Pakistan have fallen back on the hope that the memory of a common fight against the Hindus and the Congress–which fight is supposed to have won Pakistan–will also produce a solid Pakistani culture. This reliance on a negative political factor for cultural fruition is on the face of it naive. It will not work unless culture could be made to order. Meanwhile, what are the facts? Political regimentation in the name of an Islamic State, and orders for an Islamic culture without any realistic approach thereto. Civil liberties are, in this atmosphere, in eclipse. The result is a sense of suffocation leading on to underground channels of feeling and organisation. Religious nationalism finds its anti-thesis in anti-religious Communism. Frustration is writ large on the faces of conscious youths of East Bengal. There also is a fear of not living, of sure death. There also is a cry for immortality.

Death has come into our world, death has come into our lives. We have attained independence. Yet why do we feel, both within and without ourselves, so wretched? We must therefore make an attempt to live. We are the people. Age after age, it is the people of India who have risen against the social and cultural domination of the upper classes often masquerading as castes, and in course of their own socio-cultural evolution caused the conflicts within the body-politic to be resolved. So it was in the Buddhist revolution, the Vaishnavite upsurge, and similar movements of life and thought. No doubt always orthodox society leaning on classical thought staged a reaction. But in the process it absorbed as best as it could what it sought to defeat. So it was with the Hindu revival after the defeat of Buddhism. The synthetic core of Indian life and culture was preserved. Today however it is no longer society and culture apart. Today life is socio-centred to the extent that its betterment is not possible without collective action. Collective action means political action. It cannot be said as yet what methods the people will choose. For, ultimately the people will choose, not the parties. The people will choose also in Pakistan. The quest for freedom there will transcend the religio-national–which means the communal–setting. For, not within communal bounds can the values of art and science in this twentieth century be attained. Therefore men’s and women’s spirits are today starved in Pakistan. For contacts outside, if only through books, they feel a spiritual hunger. Everything is being done to stifle such contacts, and the extension of the passport system to travel between East Bengal and India is the latest of such measures. Already its dialectical result is a greater yearning for continuance of cultural union between the two Bengals. Already it is being asked in West Bengal why East Bengal’s links with West are being forcibly sundered. A psychological orientation of the minds of the people of East Bengal for total alienation from West Bengal will of course be attempted. That will be no expansion of freedom, and Pakistan was conceived in a spirit of freedom from caste Hindu domination. The clock of history cannot be put back in Pakistan any more than it can be put back elsewhere. So there also the lives and thoughts of the people will work out a path of expanding freedom. It is not to be expected that East Bengal–which has made a bid for social freedom by abolishing landlordism and the Permanent Settlement–and, for the matter of that, Pakistan will agree to be shut out of modern currents of life and thought. In that case there is little reason why she should not fall in line with India’s transition from medievalism to modernism which is provenly under way. Maybe Pakistan will yet prove to be one of the movements of Indian history by which a synthesis of the country’s heterogeneous element has through conflict and revolt, been attained. The movement for Pakistan had the elemental support of the Muslim masses of India and all the elements of a popular movement. Pakistan today is an anti-thesis of all that India stands for. This relation Pakistan to India has the formal effect of challenging India’s secularism. That challenge is represented by Hindu chauvinism which is, paradoxically enough, on common ground with Pakistan regarding complete separate identities of Hindus and Muslims. Dialectically, however, the challenge has the effect of chastening and strengthening secularism. On that strength the secular democracy of India withstands Hindu communalism as well.

The maintenance of secularism in India in word and deed will act as a historical-scientific force for the reclamation of Pakistan from the communal nationalism which has, in spite of certain immediate material advantages, landed her in moral and spiritual frustration. Counter-communalism–and that also in the name of nationalism–ill-conceived out of supposed retaliation against Pakistan can only retard that process. Ostensibly a formal reaction against Pakistan, it is really a reaction against the dialectical evolution of Pakistan out of the contradiction in which its genesis has placed it in relation to the requirements of progress. Every Indian, owes it to his own country to strengthen its secularism by observing it scrupulously in his individual sphere. Else he betrays ignorance of the trend of forces at work in Pakistan and lack of faith in his own country.

Maybe then Pakistan’s quest for freedom will also work her path to secularism, and on to the main stream of Indian life. The synthetic spirit of India reaches out at this stage to the unknown, unending future.

Back