topics: |  india | history | ancient

Diversity and unity within India

The endless variety is striking, often incongruous. Costume, speech, the
physical appearance of the people, customs, standards of living, food,
climate, geographical features all offer the greatest possible differences.
Richer Indians may be dressed in full European style, or in costumes that
show Muslim influence, or in flowing and costly robes of many different
colourful Indian types. At the lower end of the social scale are other Indians
in rags, almost naked but for a small loincloth. 

There is no national language or alphabet; a dozen languages and scripts
appear on the ten-rupee currency note.
There is no Indian race. People with white skins and blue eyes are as
unmistakably Indian as others with black skins and dark eyes.  In between we
find every other intermediate type, though the hair is generally black.

There is no typical Indian diet, but more rice, vegetables,
and spices are eaten than in Europe. The north Indian finds southern food
unpalatable, and conversely. Some people will not touch meat, fish, or
eggs; many would and do starve to death rather than eat beef, while
others observe no such restrictions. These dietary conventions are not
matters of taste but of religion. 

In climate also the country offers the full range. Perpetual snows in the
Himalayas, north European weather in Kasmir, hot deserts in Rajasthan, basalt
ridges and granite mountains on the peninsula, tropical heat at the southern
tip, dense forests in laterite soil along the western scarp. A
2,000-mile-long coastline, the great Gangetic river system in a wide and
fertile alluvial basin, other great rivers of lesser complexity, a few
considerable lakes, the swamps of Cutch and Orissa, complete the
sub-continental picture.

Cultural differences between Indians even in the same province,
district, or city are as wide as the physical differences between the various
parts of the country. Modern India produced an outstanding figure of
world literature in Tagore. Within easy reach of Tagore's final residence
may be found Santals and other illiterate primitive peoples still unaware of
Tagore's existence. Some of them are hardly out of the food-gathering
stage. An imposing modern city building such as a bank, government
office, factory, or scientific institute may have been designed by some
European architect or by his Indian pupil. The wretched workmen who
actually built it generally use the crudest tools. Their payment might be
made in a lump sum to a foreman who happens to be the chief of their small
guild and the head of their clan at the same time. Certainly these workmen
can rarely grasp the nature of the work done by the people for whom the
structures were erected. Finance, bureaucratic administration, complicated
machine production in a factory, and die very idea of science are beyond
the mental reach of human beings who have lived in misery on the margin
of over cultivated lands or in the forest. Most of them have been driven by
famine conditions in the jungle to become the cheapest form of drudge
labour in the city.

Yet in spite of this apparent diversity, there is a double unity. At the top
there are certain common features due to the ruling class. The class is the
Indian bourgeoisie, divided by language, regional history, and so on, but
nevertheless grouped by similarity of interests into two sections.  

  - Finance and mechanised factory production are in the hands of the real
    capitalist bourgeoisie. 

  - Distribution of the product is dominated primarily by the petty-bourgeois
    class of shopkeepers, formidable by reason of their large number.  Food
    production is overwhelmingly on small plots. The necessity of paying cash
    for taxes and factory goods forces the peasant into a reluctant and
    rather backward wing of the petty-bourgeoisie.  The normal agrarian
    surplus is also in the hands of middlemen and moneylenders who do not
    generally rise into the big bourgeoisie.

The division between the richest peasants and moneylenders is not
sharp. There are cash crops like tea, coffee, cotton, tobacco, jute, cashew,
peanuts, sugarcane, coconuts and others tied to the international market or
to factory production. These are sometimes cultivated by modern capitalist
owners by mechanised techniques on large plots of land. High finance, often
foreign, determines their prices and skims off the main profit. On the other
hand, a considerable volume of consumer goods, especially utensils and
textiles, is still produced by handicraft methods and has survived
competition with factory production. 

The political scene is dominated entirely by these two sections of the
bourgeoisie, with a class of professional (lawyers, etc.) and clerical
workers as the connecting link with the legislatures and the machinery of
administration.

Though this bourgeoisie began as compradors for the foreign traders, it was
formed out of more than one class, from a much older Indian society which
already had its class divisions. A good deal of modern Indian capital is, in
fact, transformed primitive feudal and moneylender's accumulation.  In recent
times even India's feudal princes have had to turn their crude hoarded wealth
into shares and stocks or sink into poverty. The feudal, money lending, and
trading families, especially their womenfolk, never lost the outward forms of
their religious superstition. 

The intellectuals and professionals derive from other groups which belonged
to neither of the two. They felt the strong need to foster patriotism and
national pride during the struggle for shaking off British colonial
rule. This led the new intelligentsia to discover its country's past,
sometimes to invent a glorious past where none was known. (The same problem
never arose in Japan, also an oriental country recently modernised. The
Japanese national tradition was always strong and well documented. Japan's
change to industrialisation took place under a national, indigenous
bourgeoisie without foreign occupation. Nevertheless, the Japanese
intelligentsia also took vigorously to the study and copying of Western
culture in their Meiji era. This shows that such cultural changes have deep
underlying causes. Military occupation or the attractiveness of copying new
fashions will not explain the phenomenon.) The very same Indian bourgeoisie,
however, drove out the powerful British rulers of India after a bitter and
protracted struggle. The expulsion would not have been possible unless a
great segment of the Indian people had accepted the leadership of the
advanced wing of this bourgeoisie. The struggle was not armed on the Indian
side. The methods and ideology of Mahatma Gandhi, who conducted the
liberation movement, as also of many predecessors like Tilak, seem peculiarly
Indian, despite the clear line that connects Gandhi to Tolstoy and so to
Silvio Pellico.

Asian culture and civilisation have China and India as their two primary
sources. 
Cotton textiles (even words like 'calico', Chintz', 'dungaree', 'pyjamas',
'sash' and 'gingham' are of Indian origin) and sugar are India's specific
contribution to everyday life, just as paper, tea, porcelain, silk are
China's.