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The Rediff Special/ Amartya Sen

'Present-day Indian civilisation cannot be understood without seeing it as a joint product of many influences of which the Islamic component is very strong'

It is worth beginning by recollecting that even pre-Muslim India was not just Hindu India. Indeed, to begin with the most obvious, perhaps the greatest Indian emperor in the pre-Muslim period was a Buddhist, to wit, Ashoka, and there were other great non-Hindu emperors, including Harsha. Even as the Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni raided India, the Buddhist dynasty of the Palas was firmly in command over eastern India. In fact, Bengal moved rapidly from Buddhist rule to Muslim rule with only a very brief period of Hindu monarchy in between -- in the form of the rather hapless Sena kings.

It must also be recollected the nearly all the major world religions other than Islam were already well represented in India well before the last millennium. Indeed, when Christianity started gaining ground in Britain in the seventh century, India had had large and settled communities of Christians for at least three hundred years -- certainly from the fourth century. Jews too had been settled in India -- in fact from immediately after the fall of Jerusalem. And of course, Buddhism and Jainism had been quite well-entrenched in India for a very long time. The Muslim arrival merely filled up the spectrum.

Another point to note is that unlike the British rule in India where the rulers remained separate from the ruled, Muslim rulers in India were combined with the presence of a large proportion of Muslims in the population itself. A great many people in the land embraced Islam, so much so that three of the four largest Muslim national populations in the contemporary world are situated in this subcontinent: in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Indeed, the only non-subcontinental country among the top four Muslim populations in the world, Indonesia, was also converted to Islam by Indian Muslims, mostly from Gujarat. Islam was by then a native Indian religion.

It is also worth noting that though Islam remained a separate religion from Hinduism, the roles of the different communities in the cultural life of the country were largely integrated. Whether in music or in painting or in poetry, evidence of integration is plentifully present. Indeed, it would be impossible to understand the nature of Indian culture today without seeing it in integrated terms.

While references to raids from Ghazni and other isolated elements of divisive history remains tactically potent and even flammable in the contemporary politics of India, the nature of the present-day Indian civilisation cannot be understood without seeing it as a joint product of many influences of which the Islamic component is very strong.

The integrated nature of contemporary Indian culture has been illustrated by many commentators with reference particularly to the arts, the literature, and music. Let me choose a different field of illustration, involving an example of integration that does not seem to have been much discussed. Even though Akbar failed, as was noted earlier, in his attempt to establish an integrated calendar, the Tarikh-Ilahi, such integration did take place in odd forms across the country.

It is, for example, year 1405 now in the Bengali calendar. What does 1405 stand for? Its history is a most engaging form of cultural integration. In the year 963 in the Muslim Heijira calendar (coinciding with 1556 AD) the Bengali solar calendar -- corresponding to the Shaka system of reckoning -- was 'adjusted' to the Hejira number, that is, the clock was put back, as it were, to 963.

Since then the Hejira has marched ahead, being a lunar calendar, so that the Bengali 'san' has fallen behind Hejira as well. But when a Bengali Hindu does his religious ceremonies according to the local calendar, he may not be fully aware that the dates invoked in his Hindu practice is attuned to commemorating Mohammad's flight from Mecca to Medina, albeit in a mixed lunar-solar representation.

The last millennium saw the occurrence of a remarkable integration in the subcontinent, and while separatists in both communities often challenge the integration that has emerged, there can be very little doubt about the range and reach of the integration that has been achieved.

Western Dominance

I turn now to the second set of questions. What about the ascendancy of the West and its world-wide impact? This has become a subject of concern and disquiet in many parts of the non-Western world -- including India. The criticism here may not have quite the form that it has in, say, West Asia, but the critique of Western influence in the post-colonial world is quite strong in India as well. There is by now quite a world literature that is directly or indirectly concerned with a 'cultural imperalism' -- a field in which Indian authors have made very substantial contributions.

There can be little doubt that there do exist many examples of cultural imperalism in the contemporary world and that they certainly call for critical scrutiny. For example, the weakening of locally rich literary traditions, which has occurred in many cases, can be cogently regretted and sensibly resisted. On the other, criticism of Westernisation can also be a cloak for unreasoned conservatism and a force for reaction in a world of constant change.

It is not only the Taliban that plants the label of Westernisation on many unsuspecting candidates (such as the schooling of girls), but the rhetoric of resisting Westernisation can be a very potent means of undermining critical scrutiny of local traditions and practices in general.

While some of the recent grumbles about Westernisation concern such commodity-centred issues as the popularity of MTV or of Coca-Cola or of Mcdonalds, the weightier disputes tend to raise questions about much profounder issues, in particular the growing dominance of ''Western modes of thinking,' 'Western conceptions of rationality,' and 'Western science and technology.'

The effect of these dominant relations is to undermine -- it has been argued -- the regional traditions of thinking, native concepts of rationality, and local knowledge and practical wisdom. An overemphasis on analytical reasoning is seen as one of the outcomes, which has tended to undermine, it is argued, the native mystical and religious ideas, and other modes of thought, that are native to India.

How justified are these diagnoses? How cogent are these concerns?

Amartya Sen, the world renowned economist, delivered this UNESCO lecture in Delhi, recently.

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Amartya Sen, continued

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