Looking for Indianness
MICHEL DANINO
OUR twenty-first century world seems
to be caught in a dangerous paradox:
on the one hand a global monoculture,
spread by market and media forces, is
constantly eroding traditional cultures,
while on the other our societies appear
ever more fragmented, with every
small bit of the mosaic noisily assert-
ing its identity. In October 2010, the
German Chancellor Angela Merkels
statement that Germanys multicultural
approach has failed, utterly failed,
was soon echoed by several of her
European counterparts, who called for
integration rather than mere juxtapo-
sition of cultures. But what are the
mechanisms of such integration, and
what happens to the identity of the
integrated bit, assuming it has will-
ingly submitted to the process?
Indeed, nothing seems more
confusing to contemporary societies
and individuals than the question of
identity: Should it be based on ethnic-
ity, religion, culture, nationality or pro-
* Michel Danino is the author of The Lost
River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati (Penguin
India, 2010) and Indian Culture and Indias
Future (DK Printworld, 2011). For two dec-
ades, Michel Danino was active in the pres-
ervation of Shola forests in the Nilgiris,
Tamil Nadu.
fession? On all of them, or on some
combination of them? Will it be sin-
gular (I am a freethinker) or plural
(a Black American), binding indivi-
duals to a community or specific soci-
ety? And what of gender, age and other
ingredients in our global khichri?
Nowhere as in India have these
questions been asked with a degree of
intensity that often moves crowds and
occasionally decides between life and
death. At the back of the numberless
identities the subcontinent has created
over time lies the overarching question
of how to define Indianness. I will not
presume to attempt such a definition;
instead, I will begin by tracing my own
journey towards identity, uninteresting
as it may be: the personal approach has
obvious and severe limits, but is often
a more honest and reliable starting
point.
My parents were born Moroc-
cans, and with three visits to that coun-
try in my early years, it became a part
of me a small but vivid bit of Orient
adding some colour to a continental
drabness. Our family is Jewish, and
something of that Jewishness remained 17
with me long after I had rejected the
Biblical foundations of Judaism; the
SEMINAR 649 September 2013
 Jewish view of life, especially its
obsession with knowledge and its
stubbornly positive outlook in the face
of adversity, always has great lessons
for a secular Jew (a useful oxymoron).
I was born and brought up in France,
and Frenchness taught me the mean-
ing of culture, intellectual lucidity
and a sense of ceaseless quest. Yet
three and a half decades ago, as an
immature but resolute twenty one
year old, I decided to come and live in
India, a country I knew next to noth-
ing about, and which many Indians
readily compared to hell in contrast
with a heavenly West.
W hy India? A short answer is, Sri
Aurobindo. The meaning he gave to
life and the evolution of humanity
appealed to me like no other thought
system I was aware of. But it was
more than thought: it also answered
and fed deeper stirrings. I was moved
by Sri Ramakrishna, inspired by
Swami Vivekananda, interested in
several other Indian great masters of
the twentieth century, and decided
that this was what I wanted to explore.
This exploration soon extended
to India: what made this land what it
is. I began studying rather haphazardly
its archaeological and historical origins
and its cultural developments. Even-
tually, I adopted Indian citizenship,
realizing that there was no meaning in
technically remaining a foreigner in
a nation I had not once felt foreign to
from the minute I had landed in Bom-
bay on a sultry evening of July 1977.
What happened to my other iden-
tities? I had become an Indian, possi-
bly a Hindu (accepting an extended
definition of the term), though still a
White (no darkness creams are
available in India), but could I still be
a Jew, a Frenchman, a European?
18 After some years, I found out that the
answer was in the positive, but those
identities were neither hyphenated
SEMINAR 649 September 2013
neatly compartmentalized as in some
Indians living abroad nor somehow
jumbled. Relegated to the periphery,
they still contributed to the core on
occasion. Whatever I had imbibed of
the French sense of rigour and discern-
ment came in handy while exploring
the jungle of ancient India, with a rid-
dle behind every tree, as it were. My
Jewish atavism protected me from
exclusiveness and saw me through
particularly rough patches, leading me
to extract their hidden message and
look beyond.
Were those peripheral identities
limiting in any way? They might have
been, left to themselves: the French
make a cult of the intellect, often
closing the door to other ranges of
consciousness; the Jews are prone to
make a cult of pragmatism. But once
reined in, my minor selves became
valuable helpers: the old Indian image
of the charioteer and his horses
applied.
T hings got curiouser when circum-
stances led me to lecture or teach
on the material and cultural roots of
Indian civilization. While I had
migrated towards Indianness, I saw
numerous young Indian moving away
from it not deliberately or consciously
so, but as a result of a fast changing
India, exposure to global media (glo-
bal meaning here, as it so often does,
American), peer pressure, and a
school system which, strangely, keeps
the best of Indias knowledge sys-
tems out of sight of the student. A
White man teaching young Indians
about their own past and heritage is
something of an irony, but India, as
we know, is the land of paradoxes.
And it had the advantage of tickling my
students curiosity, in the initial stages
at least.
It has been interesting to observe
their responses, ranging from com-
plete self-alienation to a strong urge to
rediscover themselves. In the process,
I observed what Indianness meant to
them: at one end of the spectrum, very
little, a mere accident of birth and a low
level of self-esteem as Indians, barely
relieved by an ebulient sense of patri-
otism (cricket and Bollywood among
its prime drivers); at the other, a strong
attachment fuelled by some aware-
ness of Indias intellectual, artistic,
spiritual, scientific or technological
achievements. The difference between
the two attitudes has a considerable
impact in actual life: the first produces
individuals who see themselves as
such islands in time and space, with
few or no roots; the second results in
a sense of belonging to a stream of
civilization and imparts an identity,
self-confidence and resilience.
The latter attitude is of course
something of my own, provided that
the attachment is more than merely
sentimental, and the awareness
grounded in genuine knowledge. This,
in fact, is among the first points I make
in my courses: patriotism, a superficial
and passing sentiment, easily leads to
excesses, as the most cursory reading
of history tells us; a wholesome pride
of belonging to a country, a culture, a
civilization, can only be founded on
dispassionate knowledge.
T o decide what is worth teaching
young Indians of Indias past is a deli-
cate exercise. It is tempting (and
some do yield to the temptation) to
use shortcuts and paint a glorious pic-
ture of a golden past by exaggerating
here, misinterpreting there and cherry-
picking all over. This, of course, leads
nowhere, because it makes nonsense
of the long maturing of ideas, trials and
errors, debate and disagreement that
go into the building of knowledge. At
the other end of the spectrum, for the
last few decades a neo-colonial view
of India as a land that failed to produce
any useful knowledge has resulted in
standard history books that blank out
most advances in science, technology,
grammar, literature, yoga and spiritu-
ality, among other thought systems.
Ashoka or Akbar find a place, not
Panini, Patanjali or Aryabhatta. Strik-
ing a middle path has been challeng-
ing, but rewarding.
A more difficult exercise is to recon-
cile this high culture, which has elicited
the admiration of countless travellers
to India and western Indologists, with
the spectacle of life in modern India.
I am not just referring to the fast rise
in violent crime, financial fraud or all-
pervasive greed and corruption, but
also to a less tangible though equally
serious ravage: in this land which, from
all accounts, valued and nurtured
beauty, not just in great monuments but
in everyday life, we now have to live
with unsightly dwellings, ugly and
polluted cities, garbage heaps sending
up toxic fumes from every village,
clouds of smog extending across vast
stretches of rural areas, disappearing
rivers and forests.
There seems to be a growing dis-
connect between modern Indians and
the nature their ancestors regarded as
sacred, a tacit acceptance that eco-
nomic growth comes at a price a price
no one can quantify, but which cer-
tainly involves a sacrifice of the finer
aspects of life. To a sense of aesthet-
ics nurtured on, say, sublime Indian
music and dance, the grandeur of
Indian architecture, the exquisite
delicacy and rich imagery of a Kali-
dasa, an encounter with the indescrib-
able vulgarity of Indias nouveaux
riches or an awareness of the colos-
sal wastage of material or human
resources in public life are like slaps
in the face.
I have not yet quite managed to
understand how those Indians who still
embody the former values manage to
survive the latter. I am well aware that
every culture can throw up such pain-
ful paradoxes; Voltaire or Beethoven
may not be of great daily concern to
the average twenty-first century
European. But the distance between
the two ends of the spectrum seems
to me much greater in India.
Since going back is never a
solution, in my limited field I have
endeavoured to show, through real-
life examples, how Indian ethics or
ecological traditions could still offer
solutions, with due adaptation, to the
increasingly unmanageable problems
besetting twenty-first century. Others
have done it before, and better, in fields
like agriculture, irrigation, nature con-
servation or medicine, often with con-
siderable success. And while ordinary
Indians tolerate (though with growing
signs of impatience) endless deceit
and bottomless incompetence on
the part of their rulers, this very state
of things has given rise to numerous
unsung heroes: men and women,
generally unknown and more often
than not from humble social origins,
who have silently protected a forest,
planted trees in urban or rural space,
rescued brutalized animals, opened a
school on a pavement, protected a
monument, a pond or a river, or some-
times their country with no regard for
their own lives.
I have tried to keep track of a
few such Indians, whose contribution
will not appear in official reports or
history textbooks, but who are, in
my opinion, those who best help us
understand Indianness: they are
embodiments of Indias ancient value
system, which prayed for the welfare
of every creature and enjoined one to
leave the world a better place than he
or she found it.
C an this worldview (I am referring
here to the belief systems that go by
the names of Hinduism, Jainism and
Buddhism) contribute in any way to
easing the growing tensions of our glo-
balized twenty-first-century societies,
Indian or not?
I have already alluded to nature
conservation based on Indias high
ecological traditions. It is, in fact, a
whole philosophy of environment that
they flowed from, based on the one
hand on the sacredness of nature, and
on the other on restraint: we can milk
the earth, in the image of the
Mahabharata, but not bleed her; she is
our mother, not a garbage dump for our
precious consumption. Ancient India
developed the art of being happy with
little not asceticism, but just what is
required for our basic needs to be taken
care of. In contrast, current market
economics creates a condition of
being unhappy with much. Many of the
saner voices we hear today in the West
(Schumacher was a pioneer) have
used some of these Indian threads to
weave a new paradigm of sustainable
development in which consumption
becomes a side activity, no longer an
end, and the human being is restored
to the centre.
S ecularism is the shibboleth of our
century. It was Europes creation: she
needed it to free herself from the
clutches of churches. But in India,
no ruler ever imposed a state religion.
Indian history reverberates with wars,
but not wars of religion. With rare
exceptions, belief systems a term
more apt than religion in the Indian
context were a matter of individual or
communal choice, not to be interfered
with; they could hardly have been, the
said systems having non-dogmatic
foundations.
Strictly speaking, then, secular-
ism of the European kind is ill-suited to
India, since religion did not here
attempt to harness political power.
Moreover, it is not just nature that was 19
(since I cannot honestly use the pre-
sent tense here) regarded as sacred,
SEMINAR 649 September 2013
 but, ideally, all stages and activities of
human life: studying, marrying, acquir-
ing wealth, benefiting the society at
large, or simply building ones house.
Such a culture is non-secular by defi-
nition and shows the limits of our
concept of secularism: imposing it
on Indian public life can only lead to
cultural nihilism, as we have seen in
the field of education: in the name of
keeping religion out, it is the whole of
Indian heritage that has been hidden
from the view of its rightful inheritors.
B ecause of this awkward situation,
which Indias intellectual discourse has
never really confronted (what to make,
for instance, of Sri Aurobindos asser-
tion, There is to me nothing secular?),
India had to invent its own definition
of secularism, holding that the term
actually means equal treatment of all
religions and religious tolerance.
Thus, in India, I am a secular
person, an oft-heard proud assertion,
really means, I am broad-minded (or
at least I think I am) and well disposed
towards all religions. Perhaps future
editions of standard dictionaries will
end up including this unorthodox defi-
nition (with an India tag), and secu-
larism will end its chequered carrier
as a mere appendage of the notion of
tolerance. But here too, the Indian
brand of tolerance is different from the
one Europe came up with after a long
and bloody experiment in intolerance:
here, in its genuine form, it is accept-
ance acceptance that the other is as
much a manifestation of divinity as
oneself, and therefore has as much a
right to strike his or her own path to the
truth.
This attitude has been very
largely practised in India, resulting in
the mind-boggling cultural pluralism
that confronts us at every street cor-
20 ner. Even the caste system, now stud-
ied exclusively through a prism of
exclusion and marginalization, did
SEMINAR 649 September 2013
have inclusive features that promoted
cultural diversity, endowing each com-
munity with customs, festivals, some-
times godheads of its own. But Indias
model is neither the mosaic nor the
salad bowl; I like to think of it as a
banyan tree, constantly throwing fresh
roots, but keeping its trunk at the cen-
tre. There is a centre. Indian society,
sorely tested and bruised as it may be,
remains a living proof of it; otherwise,
I am convinced it would have irretriev-
ably fragmented long ago.
It may, of course, yet do so. No
one knows whether or how long what
remains of Indias classical culture will
survive (and I am well aware that
many, regarding it as hopelessly obso-
lete, actually wish its final disappear-
ance). Throughout its history, this land
has had a proverbial ability to assimi-
late, transform, while retaining that
indefinable Indianness; but the present
phase is enormously more rapid and
intrusive, and its impact incalculable.
India may finally graduate to a deve-
loped nation, with a few of its old
customs and traditions relegated to the
role of flower pots or museum pieces;
or she may splinter into several con-
tending nations, some of which would
soon fall victims to the expansive
affections of our neighbours.
O r she may find that there is still
something worthwhile in her old
value system and try to apply it to her
problems. Problems which are now
no longer hers alone: perhaps no coun-
try is now untouched by the riddle of
peaceful coexistence in the face of ris-
ing intolerance and fanaticism. Indias
solution, if she has one, is to insist on
our common human roots, but roots
which, like the cosmic tree of the
Upanishads, are above, while our
branches spread below. Without some
divine source, human life can have
no meaning; that, perhaps, might be in
the end what Indianness is about.