Pessimism

I have been rereading the excellent little book at reference 1 about language in India during Nehru’s long tenure in the middle of the twentieth century – with the map above giving some idea of the importance of language there. India is a very big country and even quite a small blob on the map can represent many millions of speakers – more millions than those of many European languages. And while Hindi might score far and away the most speakers, there are plenty of substantial minorities – some of which have  much longer histories, much stronger literary traditions, than that of Hindi. With religion – particularly Hindu and Islam – layered on top of that. And caste.

In the course of which King – writing near thirty years ago – writes about the enduring pessimism of the chattering classes about the future of India and refers to the essay at reference 2 by Gould, the subject of the present post. Just over ten pages long.

Both King and Gould come from the academic scene in the US – and neither are coy about passing judgement on the doings of the UK. This being before US academics got a bit more self-conscious about the doings in their own backyard.

Gould opens with a survey of some of this pessimism, running from the 1960s to the 1980s. That is to say after the heady optimism of independence had faded in the face of the messy realities of governing a very large, very diverse and only patchily developed country. There was going to be change on a large scale and Gould’s argument is that such change is inevitably going to be accompanied by some unseemly pushing and shoving. He does not have much to say about the savagery of the fighting between communities that were sometimes part of this. While Mrs. Gandhi was assassinated in 1984, in response to her ordering what turned out to be a rather heavy-handed army response to a group of Sikh freedom fighters.

Gould is interested in why this pessimism about the future of India persisted, despite India’s continued survival as a more or less working democracy. He was writing before the rise of the Hindu movement which is governing India now – and which leaves various large minorities, not least the many millions of Muslims rather uncomfortable – to say the least of it. Noting in passing, that in round terms, there are 250m Muslims in Pakistan, 200m in India and 150m in Bangladesh. The former conquerors who now have tricky relations with their former subjects. Plenty of other examples of this around the rest of the world. And while we might have our problems here in the UK, Normans fighting with their former subject Saxons is not one of them - that conquest being a thousand, rather than a hundred years ago.

He closes with three observations about why this pessimism persisted.

First, there was the saintly legacy of the Free India Movement led by Mahatma Gandhi and others. It was relatively easy to keep one’s hands clean so long as one was on the outside. But it took the chatterers, both at home and elsewhere, a good while to adjust their expectations when they moved to the inside in 1947.

Second, most of the chatterers came from the higher classes and many of them were educated in the UK. They were not used to dealing with the lower classes on anything like a basis of equality – and equality which was very much on the move.

Third and last, this education had given them a rose-tinted view of, and far too much respect for, the workings of our Houses of Parliament. They expected India to be governed in the same way.

Gould closes with:

‘… Some of the abhorrence which many Indian intellectuals feel towards their political system, and particularly their apperception of imminent doom, arises from a deep-seated belief that their politics have never measured up to a British ideal which was transmitted to them through British education for the express purpose of trying to persuade them that they never could’.

I dare say things have changed a bit in the intervening forty years.

But I do wonder whether the free-enterprise, buccaneering traditions of the US are visible in all this. The rough and tumble of competition is expected in the US, respected even. While here in the UK, despite all our trade and industry of the nineteenth century, we are still a bit down on both, with many of our best and brightest ending up in universities or government, rather than the real world.

An interesting read, courtesy of the Internet Archive of reference 3.

References

Reference 1: Nehru and the language politics of India – Robert D. King – 1997. 

Reference 2: On the apperception of doom in Indian political analysis – Harold A Gould – 1985. A reference in reference 1 above. In ‘Region and nation in India – edited by Paul Wallace – 1985’. New Delhi.

Reference 3: https://archive.org/.