In Looking for the Nation: Towards Another Idea of India, Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee brings some of India’s most original political thinkers – Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo and B.R. Ambedkar – in conversation with the 21st century.Bhattacharjee’s book foregrounds the rise in rightwing nationalism as a return to the politics of Partition, and its role in re-emphasising territories of exclusion against minorities, Dalits, secular thinkers and activists.The book also discusses the cases of all those who have faced and suffered fierce ‘othering’ based on caste or religion, like Rohith Vemula, Najeeb Ahmed, Hadiya and Shalubai Kasbe. It offers a radical argument for political justice based on ethics, and argues a new politics of trust. In a chat, Bhattacharjee walks through the corridors of thinking that resulted in the book.Also read: Does a Pluralistic Nation Like India Really Need ‘Vande Mataram’?You speak of Nehru as someone who ‘discovered’ India on his own terms, with faith in science and rationality and as a hybrid between European and Indian sensibilities. Even though Indian society was largely illiterate and steeped in religious belief-systems, why was it easy for Indians in the 1950s to accept him as an unchallenged national leader?The Hindu right wants to project Nehru as someone who is too westernised for India. Nehru had said that India was in his “blood” and yet he admitted that he tried to understand it, “almost as an alien critic”. Intimacy and objectivity are not antithetical. India is not a Nehruvian idea. But it was Nehru, who imagined India as an “idea” that belongs to the future. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, he wanted to challenge religious traditions with a measure of rationality. Social reformers, including those in the Bengal Renaissance, also demanded these changes.Jawaharlal Nehru signing the Indian Constitution. Photo: Wikimedia CommonsNehru was a Renaissance figure. He was a good bilingual orator. Despite his elitist roots, years of ordinary life in the freedom movement and his time in jail (where he wrote The Discovery of India), got Nehru closer to people. He took to the crowd as much as it took to him. The poor understand simplicity and empathy. Nehru was also a man who wrote to [Soviet Union leader] Leonid Brezhnev to allow [writer] Boris Pasternak to accept the Nobel Prize.You write that the political thought of Nehru, Aurobindo, Tagore, Gandhi and Ambedkar can be classified as historicist, metaphysical, mystical, ethical and materialist, respectively. Which of these (almost competing) ideologies were most suitable for the anti-colonial movement in India?All of them were suitable. India is a deeply religious country and the idiom and imagery of political ideas had to often emerge from within the cultural resources of reformist traditions. Modernity did not mean simply technological changes in machinery. It ushered changes in a new techne in knowledge formations. India’s mystical traditions contributed to the new political vocabulary.Tagore’s reading of the Upanishads brought a metaphysical dimension to his ideas of the self, spirit and community. Gandhi’s idea of truth was ethical. Nehru’s idea of India was historical, not mythical. Ambedkar’s ethics was based on the materiality of caste relations. Each feature had a critical relationship with the other.You write, “If today we have to assess the meaning of a date (like August 15), it cannot simply be a cyclical commemoration of what it meant to people in the beginning, but a reckoning of whether that date has kept its promise to the future. Dates are mere accidents which cannot exhaust the future of freedom”. To what should our allegiance lie in the project of collective remembrance? Do nations need (a) memory?Collective memory has ethical significance only when it is not part of any “project” of remembering. People who collectively mourn an event, or celebrate, do so spontaneously. They feel it in their bodies. There is nothing abstract about it. During national events, sentiments are manufactured through clichés and deliberate selectivity. The project of collective remembering is a yearly ritual, where forgetting plays a more key role than memory. Everybody celebrates what nobody remembers. Memory becomes indistinguishable from propaganda.‘Looking for the Nation: Towards Another Idea of India’ by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee, Speaking Tiger Books, 2018.I think books are the best sources of memory in a nation. Only an enlightened reading public distills the value of memory from its dangers. What counts as memory is the memory of suffering that is accessible, and immediate. What the body remembers is memory.Justice and freedom are the two grand projects of modern nation-states. You seem to be in favour of justice. Do you think that justice usurps liberty, or are they antithetical to each other?For Gandhi, justice to minorities was the foundation of India’s freedom. It’s an admirably ethical idea that is difficult to understand, let alone appreciate, in our majoritarian times. Political movements claiming freedom today aren’t always raising questions of internal justice.For Gandhi, justice was not merely freedom from British rule, but how we conceive a society after the coloniser has departed. Ambedkar’s reminder that Hindus have to account for injustices against the Untouchables, and his efforts to emancipate his people from exclusion and stigma, ran parallel to his participation in the freedom movement.Communists did not appreciate Ambedkar’s politics because they were caught in the universal discourse of class. Upper caste intellectuals within the Left, failed to be sensitive to the question of social justice that came from historical specificity.There is a bold suggestion in the book that the dream of a free and just India was lost within its first couple of decades because it failed to overcome the primary contradictions held out by the project of modern nation-state, the question of ‘who rightfully belongs to the nation’. Do you think that the socio-political conflicts plaguing the country for the past 70 years could be resolved in any different way?I would relate this to your previous question. I think a possible – and promising – way to begin to address the socio-political conflicts facing India in the last 70 years, is to make justice the central question. Instead of spreading paranoia in the name of national security, inventing and hunting for imaginary enemies, and raking up petty quarrels over who contributed how much to the freedom movement, the nation must reopen the lost cause of justice. The various injustices we are witnessing against minorities today, are adding to the crimes of the past.In your discussion on what constitutes a ‘good’ Hindu in the present context you argue the murders of M.M. Kalburgi, Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare (and one may add, Gauri Lankesh) is a reaction not to their rationalist and secular ideals but to the doubts raised about their politics. How do you see their politics vis-à-vis their rationalism?Dabholkar was a stated rationalist. The others were raising questions that had political implications, or had an effect on how a certain community wanted to remember (or rather, not remember) its heroes, or to define themselves, or to refuse to belong to a larger identity. Their views may have been defined as rationalist when held against views that were opposed to theirs, but I think such labelling mostly comes from a facile post-Enlightenment understanding of reason.Francisco Goya’s ‘The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters’. Photo: Wikimedia CommonsWhat those left-leaning activists were doing was asserting their minds, and their freedom to question and interpret. Traditions are challenged if they are oppressive, with or without reason.Everything in the world need not be rational. The Age of Reason gave us colonialism, the Holocaust, Stalinist gulags, the death of collective conscience, and did not prevent us from being unethical intermediaries of power. Reason does not make us ethical.There is a famous etching by the Spanish painter Francisco Goya, titled The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. I do not mean reason must go to sleep. But reason cannot be our master.We must believe in miracles too. Miracles of life that enhance life and imagination, not of fake gurus who hoodwink people.Much of the final section of your books speaks of the untold horrors unleashed upon the Dalits, Muslims and women of India in the past five years. You start with Rohith Vemula’s death and end with Najeeb’s disappearance. What is so peculiar about the numerous atrocities committed on these individuals in the past five years that make them distinctive from the atrocities of the previous years?The difference is twofold. There is a sudden, systematic rise in violence against Dalits, because they are asserting themselves, dismantling the territorial rules of caste.Meanwhile, Muslims are being targeted to turn religious identity territorial. Najeeb’s disappearance is a vanishing trick, a known method of punishment under fascist and totalitarian systems. Najeeb turned into thin air so that fear and agony spreads through the absent minority body. Another form of this territorial violence is detention camps, where human life is caged like animal life.Also read: The Closed Doors of Caste in IndiaIn the current phase of hyper-nationalism experienced in India and other parts of the world, ethics seem to have been largely forgotten. Do you believe the ethical dispositions of an earlier time can act as a bulwark against the current violent tide of nationalism? Or is it time to proclaim that we have entered a post-ethics phase and look for other alternatives?My perspective is that of a political ethicist’s. I am interested in ethical questions in politics. My main interest is not the individual or class, or any categorical idea of identity, but “others”. I look at India through the lens of how it treats its others: Dalits, Muslims, refugees, Nagas, Kashmiris.Being a refugee, my concerns are minoritarian and migrant. Nationalism, as such, lacks ethics. All nationalisms are limited by territoriality and internal exclusions. But ethical questions can be raised within national movements. They were raised by Ambedkar, Gandhi and others. Those questions are being raised against the current tide of majoritarianism. They are the best source of moral force.The “post” phase of anything does not mean a particular concern has grown less important. Rather, the opposite. In a post-truth era, the battle for truth is more crucial than ever. In a post-ethics phase, the need for ethics is paramount.Alok Oak is a doctoral researcher at Leiden Institute of Area Studies, University of Leiden, the Netherlands.
