Nation, State and Self-Hatred

South Asia lifted the idea of nation state from borrowed books. There is, however, another way of entering the twenty-first century.

When South Asia started its independent journey as a collection of states in 1947, it was in one sense a continuation of the project South Asians had given themselves towards the middle of the nineteenth century. The project was the modernisation of the region, and it had three clear components. We wanted to build nation states the way those who then ruled South Asia had already done in Europe; we wanted ´development´, even though the term had not yet come into vogue; and we had to inculcate in our generally "superstitious" , "change-resisting" people an appreciation of the principles of scientific and technological rationality.

All three of these responsibilities were formally vested in the growing states of the newly decolonised countries. Thus, the new South Asian states had to ensure not only national security, which states had been doing for centuries, but also carry the hopes and ambitions of millions.

Fifty years after independence, it is obvious that there was something wrong in the way South Asia imported the concept of state, as if it were a talisman. We picked it up not from life but from books. As a result, our idea of the nation state was more purist than that of colonial societies on which it was modelled. We thought we could get what we needed from Anglo-Saxon universities like Oxford or Cambridge, so we did not bother with the particulars of state-formation and nation-building in the Continent.

The South Asian elite was also oblivious of the fact that state-formation and nation-building usually had quasi-criminal antecedents. Everywhere, nation states were built on human suffering and disenfran-chisement of large sections of the population. This was true even in England. If we had read between the lines of the formal textbooks of history and politics, we would have found many instances—from the Enclosure Movement to the denial of franchise to women—which showed that the emergence of open society in the West did not come with the state´s benediction, or from constitutional changes introduced by an enlightened elite, or from texts. They came through political processes which the state did not control.

Not learning from the experience of the West, South Asia has merely telescoped the Western model into its own societies. A kind of self-hatred is involved in the exercise of remodelling ourselves according to someone else´s history. That is the tragedy of virtually every society in this part of Asia.

A Kind of Self-Hatred

Nothing shows the hazards of this dependence on texts better than the surge of ethnic chauvinism in South Asia. In Sri Lanka, for instance, the august principles of Sinhala chauvinism, the root cause of today´s violence, were worked out, among others, by Dhammapala. He devised the model of a monocultural Sinhala nation and a monolithic, dominant Sinhala culture the same way that V.D. Savarkar developed the principles of Hindutva sitting in Nagpur. The only difference is that Dhammapala sat at Calcutta in his formative years and was influenced by Vivekananda´s writings on Hinduism. I do not hold Vivekananda responsible for the bloodshed today in Sri Lanka, but Dhammapala might have chosen to see in Sri Lanka a different kind of community having a different concept of public life and a different form of tolerance. He did not. Having given himself the task of improving the Sinhala, Dhammapala managed to create posthumously two antagonistic nationalities in his country, the Sinhala and the Tamil.

The tragedy of Sri Lanka is the tragedy of every society in this part of the world. Thus, since the end of the nineteenth century, most major Muslim reformers, reportedly operating on the basis of the Quran and the Hadith, have found the Muslims of South Asia and Southeast Asia deficient. They have seen the Indonesian Muslims, who form the largest Muslim country in the world, as peripheral Muslims; Indian Muslims, the world´s second largest Muslim community, as no better; and, of course, found the fish-eating Bangladeshi Muslims, the world´s third largest Muslim community, quite obnoxious.

By this reckoning at least 80 percent of the world´s Muslims have been rendered peripheral by nineteenth-century South Asian Islamic reformers and scholars influenced by European specialists on Islam. According to these European scholars and their disciples in South Asia, the West Asian Muslims are the authentic prototypical Muslims and other Muslims have to try to approximate them.

The Politics of Knowledge

The politics of knowledge in South Asia must begin with the awareness that knowledge resides not only in us, or with our patrons or mentors in the famous universities of the world. Knowledge also originates, exists and is waiting to be discovered in the people living around us. I, for one, was pushed into this awareness not by studies of systems of knowledge, but by studies of politics and cultures of politics.

Year ago, some of us, when told of the structural and functional prerequisites of democracy and why democracy could not survive in countries where education, economic growth, urbanisation and modernisation were low, wanted to find out why it was, then, that democracy had survived in India. We found that the so-called illiterate, rural, poor Indians had a larger stake in the democratic system because they wanted to change their fate through the use of political power. Often, their rates of political participation were higher and they granted greater legitimacy to their political system than the electorate in the "advanced" democracies.

We began to suspect that the argument about structural prerequisites, whether it strengthened democracy or not, were meant to endorse the regimes of those Southern societies which had suspended democratic rights but were part of the Western bulwark against the "red menace". The whole of Latin America was at that time full of tin-pot dictators. South Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia also had autocratic regimes. Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines used the argument to best advantage. He was, he said, a democrat at heart, but the Filipinos were not yet fit for democracy. For the short run, therefore, said Marcos, he had to act like a strict school master.

Engaging formulations of this argument have been ventured by everyone from General Suharto to Mahathir Mohammad. Mahathir still repeats it, with the only difference that he now adds that, in Islam, the concept of democracy is different.

It is while defying this argument that we have been pushed towards other kinds of ideas that would legitimise culturally-rooted open societies. Creation of such societies would involve a rediscovery of our other cultural selves, which we have under-valued. For their part, South Asians are challenged to rediscover themselves and come to terms with their multicultural identity.

Simultaneous Identities

Through the voluminous study of the Indian Anthropological Survey on the peoples of India which began to be published in 1994, we find that there are some six hundred communities in India which still cannot be identified with any single religion. They are simultaneously Hindu and Muslim, Hindu and Sikh, Sikh and Christian, Sikh and Muslim, and so on. But in cases like that of the Meos, the largest Muslim community around Delhi, which traces its ancestry from the Mahabharata, discrimination and communal riots have increasingly threatened this bicultural identity. To the Meos, this identity now tends to be a liability, exactly as it is an embarrassment to the Westernised Indian.

I have gradually come to suspect that every person in South Asia has more than one identity. There is perhaps no other part in the world where people live with such immense variety—with about 2000 languages, 20,000 castes and subcastes, more than 250 tribes, and scores of regional, ecological and other cultural differences. Sometimes, many of these difference are to be found within a person.

The South Asians know how to live with this diversity, though they may have forgotten some of these skills in recent years, having chosen to wear new ideological blinkers that blind them to all traditional community-based, culturally-transmitted skills. The idea of nation state we have imported has played an important role in this self-inflicted blindness, for the nation states fears diversity.

The Japanese are not embarrassed when their census reports that a majority of Japanese are Shinto and, also, that a majority of them are Buddhist. But to modern South Asians, such facts are an embarrassment. They would like to see someone either as a Hindu or as a Muslim, because that is the way of European scholarship, and we look at ourselves through its prism.

The end result was that the politicians started exploiting the potential of having clear-cut self-definitions. Using such definitions to divide the populace, they are herding our societies up dangerous paths. However, the politicians make use of these new possibilities only because modern-day South Asian intellectuals and the middle classes have allowed them a free run in the area of culture. We have stood as silent witnesses to the destruction of our heritage. We could have used this heritage differently and more creatively, but we have not.

The intellectual challenge in South Asia, therefore, is to rediscover the South Asian self. For that, we need to first transcend our own self-hatred and self-doubt.