Ancient India produced great poets, philosophers and playwrights, along with art forms, gods and goddesses to match anything on offer in Athens, but it did not give birth to an Aristotle. And nothing remotely resembling the Assembly in Athens or the Senate in Rome arose on the subcontinent. Surely this must reflect some deficiency. Despite arguments within the elite and some wonderful expressions of skepticism cited by Sen, the demos was kept under strict control throughout Indian history. Uprisings threatening the status quo were brutally crushed by Hindu and Muslim ruler alike. Superstition and irrationality were institutionalized via a network of priestly domination.

The resilience of Brahman traditions lay not in encouraging debate but in the power of the iniquitous caste system that survives to this day and pervades the spirit of Indian democracy. One wishes that Sen, a longstanding critic of economic inequality, had given us his views on whether globalization tends to weaken or strengthen caste chauvinism in India. When in the third decade of the past century, the "untouchable" leader Dr. Ambedkar insisted that his caste not be considered Hindu so that they, like the Muslims, could demand separate electorates from the British rulers, he was sweetly rebuffed by Mahatma Gandhi, no doubt for the noblest of reasons. Hard-core confessional elements in the leadership of the ruling Congress Party were only too aware that without the "low castes" being counted as Hindus their overall weight in the population would be drastically reduced.

What of India's Muslims? The Mughal conquest of India created a strong centralized state, but there was not even an embryonic consciousness of democracy, even in its most primitive, patrician form. The emperor was supreme. His subjects could plead for justice in his presence once a week, and if they were lucky they could be rewarded with a few coins and kind words. Interestingly enough, while all the existing texts of classical Greece and Rome were translated into Arabic during the eighth and ninth centuries, and while Islamic schools of philosophy, mathematics, astronomy and medicine flourished in Córdoba, Palermo and Baghdad, the one genuine innovation of the Greeks--the idea of democracy--did not travel. The caliph was both the spiritual and the temporal ruler, and any notion of an assembly of equals would have been seen as a godless challenge to Allah's vice regent. The Mughal order in India was based on an alliance of the wealthy and the creation of a strong central bureaucracy with rights over large tracts of land.

Sen is correct to stress the tolerance of the Mughals, particularly Akbar, toward the non-Muslim majority. The reasons for this policy, however, were not simply altruistic. The Muslim conquerors, like the British after them, knew that stable rule was dependent on securing the consent of crucial layers of the indigenous elites. This they did successfully, and even the last of the great Mughal emperors, the devout and narrow-minded Aurangzeb, presided over an imperial army led by an equal mix of Hindu and Muslim generals. When the British East India Company's army secured Bengal as a bridgehead in 1757 and made Calcutta the first capital of British India, it did so with a very small number of British officers, European weaponry and local recruits on a monthly wage. Like its Mughal predecessor, the company was desperate for allies and often bought them in the marketplace. The Bengali Renaissance that produced Nobel Prize-winning writer and poet Rabindranath Tagore, filmmaker Satyajit Ray, the Sens and numerous others was the result of a unique synthesis between local tradition and imperial modernity, based on a capitalist economy. Without capitalism there was no Indian modernity. Democracy in British India (as in Britain itself) came a century and a half later as a result of pressure from below on the part of a growing middle-class intelligentsia in Calcutta. "What Bengal thinks today," declared the reformer Ram Mohun Roy, "India thinks tomorrow."

That is why imperial ideologues as well as colonial apologists like Rudyard Kipling came to despise Bengal. The Bengalis, in their estimation, were effete intellectuals ill equipped to fight, unlike the "martial races" of the Punjab and North-West Frontier. Kipling's fiction is filled with crude stereotypes of the dark-skinned Bengali babu (clerk) as contrasted with the noble and fair-skinned Pathan or the Rajput warrior. Better they were kept illiterate lest they become uppity like the Bengalis.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.