Why India falters in its tryst with Modernity August 27, 2013, 4:18 pm by R. Chandrasoma India has a long and rich history with interludes of great splendor against a backdrop of dour and sustained struggle to beat off determined enemies and keep alive a fragile tradition of spirituality that was authentically its own. There is another battle which it has largely lost and this defeat bodes ill for the future of a potentially great nation. It is the battle to achieve modernity in a nation with teeming millions inured to ways of life that are no longer viable or appropriate given the vast changes in the condition of mankind witnessed in the course of recent centuries. What are these changes? The first is the fruit of the secular humanism that swept over the Western World – the recognition that irrespective of birth and circumstance, all human life has a dignity that must be respected and a status that tolerates no natural hierarchies. It might appear at first that this is a truism that brooks no challenge and that the diverse religions of India do recognize it as a foundational ethical principle. Matters become problematic, however, when it clashes with a belief that has foundational status in all Indian religions – the notion of karmic destiny and the coupling of the conditions of life of humanity to the deeds (or misdeeds) of their ‘predecessors’in prior realms of existence. This leads to the extraordinary claim that current destitution (for example) is an irrevocable ‘punishment’ that must be endured as an ironclad destiny. Conversely, those endowed with great felicity, status and good health need not feel bad about the rank social asymmetries accruing from this dynamic of the world because it is the unfolding of a natural scheme of trans-generational justice that must be accepted even if it appears to contribute immensely to the misery of mankind as a whole. It is the entrenched nature of this all-encompassing belief that blocks progress – modernity - in India. The idea of ‘working for others’ – true altruism – has no firm hold on the Indian spirit because the struggle to better one’s condition in the next world is the individualistic and all-absorbing concern for a human being.. Any ‘work for others’ is merely an aspect of the individual struggle to be better placed than the unfortunates who are supposedly handicapped through prior misdeeds. It is a sanctified selfishness that soon betrays its true anti-social roots. Why is there so much abject poverty in India? Why are the rich placing untold wealth in the form of gold in Temple-vaults while misery festers and the poor are trampled to death on their way to meet God? Why are latrines a luxury in India while cell-phones abound? Why do city slums expand in strict proportion to the size and wealth of the city? Why are vital health statistics so appalling in a country with a surfeit of doctors? Why are newborns so much at risk in a nation that has some of the most advanced hospitals in the world? Why are Indian centres of learning among the worst in the world despite the acknowledged fact that men of great genius lived and acted as beakons to mankind in the ages past? Is it not the lack of that collegiality and openness of mind that are the hall-mark of free inquiry? These are not difficult questions that involve learned inquiries in politics and economics. The humanistic spirit can be crushed in a seemingly prosperous nation and the result is a demeaning of mankind in ways that are easy to see. We spoke earlier of secular humanism – of a deep recognition of the oneness in spirit of all fellow –beings in an adventure that is played out in our unique planetary habitat. The Indian Mind finds it difficult to accept that the ‘life to come’ cannot be the lodestone guiding our actions in this world – a truth missed by the Wise Men of India but deeply acknowledged by the founding fathers of the American Nation such as Benjamin Franklin. This ethically informed praxis without prescriptive divinity served as a model for later Indian revisionists such as Mahatma Gandhi. The renowned scientist Dr. Steven Pinker puts it as follows – ‘the doctrine of a life-to-come is not such an uplifting idea after all because it necessarily devalues life on earth. I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness existence is a precious and fragile gift’. The ‘devaluation of life’ in our secular abode for the sake of a problematic life to come is the root cause of India’s misery.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Aug 2013 22:53:51 +0000
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