Nobel prize winner on Indian identity

[Prasad Velusamy]

Amartya Sen on Indian National Identity
> From Indian Express March 4, 2001 Section II Pg. 8

Those who argue that the Indian identity has to be in some way
derivative on Hindu identity point out not only that the Hindus
constitute a large majority of people in this country, but also that
historically Hinduism has been the mainstay of the Indian
civilization. There is clearly some substance in this argument, and
the counter arguments can be considered only after the basic facts of
the case have been recognized.

There are three distinct issues here:
(1) The first is not concerned with history at all. Identity is not a
matter of discovery – of history any more than of the present – and
has to be chosen with reasoning. Even if it were the case that Indian
history were primarily Hindu history, we still would have to
determine how a pluralist and multi-religious population can share an
Indian identity without sharing the same religion. This, of course,
is the basis of secularism in India, and our reasoning about
priorities in dealing with competing conceptions of Indian identity
need not be parasitic on history. The makers of the Indian
constitution recognized that fully, as did the United States in
adopting a largely secular constitution for a mostly Christian
population. The need to reason and choose cannot be given over to the
observation of history, and this point relates to a more general
claim I have tried to defend elsewhere – in a lecture to the Asiatic
Society entitled `On Interpreting India's Past' – arguing that while
we cannot live without history, we need not live within it either.

(2) The second point is more historical. India has been a multi-
religious country for a very long time. Aside from the obvious and
prominent presence of Muslims in India for well over a millennium
(Muslim Arab traders started settling in what is now Kerala from the
8th century), India has had Christians from atleast the 4th century,
Jews from the time of the fall of Jerusalem, Parsis from the 7th
century, and Sikhs from the time that religion was born. Also pre-
Muslim India was not, as it is sometimes claimed, mainly a Hindu
country, since Buddhism was the dominant religion in India for many
hundreds of years and Jainism was also had an equally long history
and, in fact, a large continuing presence. Since there is so much
discussion these days against Hindus converting to any other
religion, it is perhaps worth remembering that arguably the greatest
emperor of India was Asoka in the third century B.C.  (the main rival
to Asoka's claim would be from a Muslim called Akbar), and that Asoka
did convert to Buddhism from what would have been the-then form of
Hinduism.

(3) I come now to the third reason against making the Indian identity
dependent on the Hindu identity. Hindus are defined in 2 quite
distinct ways. When the number of Hindus is counted, and it is
established that the vast majority of Indians are in fact Hindu, this
is not a counting of religious belief, but essentially of ethnic
background. But when generalizations are made about, say, the
divinity of Rama, or the sacred status of the Ramayana, beliefs are
involved. By using the two approaches together, a numerical picture
is constructed in which it is supposed that a vast majority of
Indians believe in the divinity of Rama and the sacred status of the
Ramayana. For a large proportion of the Hindus, however, that
attribution would be just a mistake, since millions of people who are
defined as Hindu in the first approach do not share these beliefs
which is central to the second approach. Indeed, by making this
attribution, the champions of Hindu politics undermine the rich
tradition of heterodoxy that has been so central to the history of
the Hindu culture. It is not often recognized that Sanskrit
(including Pali and Prakrit) has a larger literature in the atheistic
and agnostic tradition than exists in any other classical language.
In the 14th century, Madhavacharya's remarkable book called
Sarvadarshanasamgraha (`the collection of philosophies') which has
one chapter each on the major schools of Hindu belief, devoted the
entire first chapter to arguments in favour of the atheistic position.

The route to Indian identity via a Hindu identity does not, I would
argue, survive critical scrutiny for each of these 3 reasons. They
point firmly towards a broader and inclusionary understanding of the
Indian identity.



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