India That Is Bharat: A Decade Of Change

The past decade of Bharat has been remarkably transformational. There isn’t an aspect of Indian life that has remained untouched by these changes. While material shifts are easily discernible, those taking place at the sociocultural levels are subtle and subliminal yet definitive. It are these sociocultural transformations that are the focus of this chapter.

From The Nation of Pietistic Gandhian Gloom To A USD 3 Trillion Economy

When the Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul visited India in 1988, around the time he began his book India: A Million Mutinies Now, he found an India ‘full of pietistic Gandhian gloom’.

1 It was an all-pervasive gloom, perhaps an outcome of nearly four decades of failed Nehruvian socialism. “The talk among the talkers in the towns,’ writes Naipaul, ‘was of degeneracy, a falling away from the standards of earlier times.”

2 Hundreds of years of Islamic and British colonisation had turned an entrepreneurial society that, for most of its existence, had been one of the most prosperous societies in the world, materially and intellectually, into a wounded, defeated, despondent and fatalist one.

The economic liberalisation of the 1990s, pioneered by Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, opened up India’s markets for foreign investments. However, after initial successes, the economic developments hit roadblocks.

Today, a sense of optimism is sweeping across India. In a post- COVID world plagued with inflation, rising food and energy prices, and the spectre of long-drawn-out wars in Europe and the Middle East, Indians are brimming with hope and confidence. There is also a hunger among Indians, old and young, to put India back to its precolonial eminence, both economically and civilisationally.

Standing atop the pedestal as the most populous nation, India is also the fastest-growing (7.6 per cent, Q2 FY24)3 large economy. By providing access to electricity, cooking gas connections, toilets, bank accounts, housing, etc., the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has empowered the poor and the most marginalised of India in a way no government did in the past.

Digitisation and mobile connectivity have revolutionised the Indian landscape. QR code displays for digital payments at roadside stalls, kiosks and street vendors are standard across the length and breadth of the country. The unified payments interface (UPI) transactions in December 2023 rose to 117.6 billion in volume and Rs 183 trillion in value, an increase of 59 per cent and 42 per cent compared to the same month in 2022.4 The combination of Aadhaar, the world’s most extensive biometric ID system, and direct benefit transfer (DBT) delivers transparent government subsidies to the beneficiaries.

Another visible transformation has been in infrastructure development. Spending on roads and highways, bridges, tunnels, train tracks and train stations, metro rail projects, airports and seaports has exploded. Growing up, I never considered road trips from Patna to Delhi. Now my cousins do it all the time. There are more universities, Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).

The New Bharat Is Full Of Aatmvishwas

Beyond the economy, India has also made significant strides in other fields. From the artistic enterprise to scientific temper and from academia to sports and politics, ‘changes are all over the place, and each one of us gets to see only slivers of those changes’, said Ramesh Rao, Professor of Communication at the Columbus State University in the US.

According to Subhash Kak, the most significant and discernible change of the last decade or so ‘is the abandonment of the old apologetic tone when speaking about [Indian] culture.’ Kak is the Regents Professor of Computer Science at Oklahoma State University, in Stillwater, USA. He is a Padma Shri recipient and a member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Science, Technology, and Innovation Advisory Council.

While the ‘abandonment’ Kak mentions stems from the rediscovering and internalising of India’s glorious heritage, the apologia is a direct byproduct of a deliberate Orientalist, Indologist and Marxist narrative.

The Orientalist, Indologist And Marxist Narrative

As postcolonial India nursed its civilisational wounds, it became acutely aware of the prevalent blanket negative narrative about her people, past, culture, texts and traditions. That awareness manifested as a force to reckon with during the last decade.

When the Europeans-the British, French and Portuguese- colonised India, they began controlling India’s intellectual discourse, and the directionality of information about India predominantly became ‘outsider to insider’. As a consequence, the native ‘insiders’ of the tradition, according to Arvind Sharma, the Berks Professor of Comparative Religion at McGill University in Canada, ‘began to be profoundly affected, even in their self-understanding of their own religious traditions, by Western [non-native outsider] accounts.’

The colonisers also created an Orientalist discourse about India. The discourse provided the basis for their political power, domination, racism and widespread colonisation. They primitivised Indians-Hindus by default-in their popular and academic presentations. Their need to portray Hindus as primitive, savage, uncivilised or vicious rose from their urgency to present themselves as civilised and ‘enlightened’. They portrayed Hindu society as being riddled with malaise. They also claimed that the so-called ‘social evils’ such as ‘sati’ and ‘caste’ always have been part of Hindu society and Hinduism.

According to Vishwa Adluri, the Western Indologists, Germans in particular, believed that ‘Indians lacked access to the “true” meaning of their [own] texts … for Indians never developed scientific critical thinking.’ Adluri, Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Hunter College, along with Joydeep Bagchee, has exposed the problems of German Indologists’ so-called ‘scientific method’ in their much-acclaimed book The Nay Science: A History of German Indology.

Post-Independence Marxists, on the other hand, consciously hid and denied any reference to India’s past achievements and glory, claiming it might embolden Hindu extremism. They picked up from where the colonialists and missionaries left, in terms of demonising almost every facet of Indian society.

Indian Knowledge Tradition

Overcoming the colonial narrative slowly but surely, there is a revival of interest in, and growing awareness about, the native Indian knowledge tradition (IKT). This awareness also includes looking at the tradition from a native ‘insider’ perspective. The Western world as well as the Indian elites who are burdened by their Western education and vested financial and other material incentives are finally willing to recognise India’s rich cultural heritage, albeit grudgingly. Earlier, an expressed pride in Indian culture and its knowledge system most likely would have been ‘painted in negative colors and the colonized Anglosphere [would have] continued to ridicule Hindu festivals and cultural practices [and more],’ said Kak.

India, traditionally, has been a knowledge society. The Indian knowledge tradition is one of the longest-surviving traditions, with immense contributions in almost all fields of intellectual inquiry. For example, physician Sushruta described rhinoplasty surgery in 600 BCE in his book Sushruta Samhita. Similarly, according to the Fields Medalist mathematician Manjul Bhargava, the so-called Pythagorean theorem first appears in Bauddhayana’s Shulba Sutra, around 800 BCE .

Indian mathematicians had mastered the basic mathematical algorithm of addition, subtraction and division at least a thousand years before the Europeans. The word ‘algorithm’ is associated with Al Khwarizmi, who borrowed and translated basic mathematical concepts and texts from India in his books. Calculus spread to the West through the Kerala School of Mathematics.

Ashtadhyayi, the treatise on grammar written by Panini in fourth century BCE , is the only complete, explicit and rule- bound grammar of any human language. Additionally, it has several formal features that directly parallel computer science. On the other hand, Yaska’s Nirukta , written in seventh century BCE, is the first serious work on etymology. Yaska was also the first scholar to treat etymology as an independent science.

Bharat, A Civilizational Nation

More and more people, including those in media and academia, now recognise the fact that India is a civilisational nation, a rashtra with a history of several thousand years. It wasn’t as if a group of ‘founding fathers’ got together one day and decided to form the republic. Bharatvarsha is sanatan, eternal. While liberty, equality and fraternity are the basis of Western democratic states, dharma is the basis of true democracy in Asia, according to Sri Aurobindo. “Through Dharma,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo in Bande Mataram (1908), ‘the Asiatic evolution fulfills itself; this is her secret.’

The notion of the modern Westphalian state is relatively new. It is only a few centuries old and is based on the assumption that a common political entity best serves the aspirations of the nation’s people. However, the notion of rashtra in the Indic civilisation is much older. It is also simultaneously different from the Eurocentric idea of a nation. The word ‘rashtra’ is used in the Vedic literature to describe the national identity of Bharatvarsha, a contiguous land mass between the snow-capped mountains of the Himalayas in the north and the deep sea in the south.

Bharatvarsha is also the land of the seven rivers, the Sapt Sindhu. It is replete with a sense of spirituality, divinity, sacredness and motherhood. In her India : A Sacred Geography , Diana Eck writes that India is a land of sacred geography that ‘bears traces of gods and footprints of heroes. Every place has its own story, and conversely, every story in the vast storehouse of myths and legends has its place.”

This excerpt is taken from the book Indian Renaissance available on Amazon .

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