MINIYA CHATTERJI
indian instinctsEssays on Freedom and Equality in India
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Introduction
PART I: INSTINCTS
1. Survival
2. Evolution
3. Exploration
4. Procreation
PART II: ANCHORS
5. Love
6. Parenting
7. Values
8. Nationalism
PART III: TRAPPED IN OUR OWN MAKING
9. Democracy
10. Religion
11. Corporations
PART IV: CHAOS
12. Money
13. Decibels
14. Aesthetics
PART V: CONCLUSION
15. Freedom
Footnotes
Introduction
1. Survival
2. Evolution
3. Exploration
4. Procreation
5. Love
6. Parenting
7. Values
8. Nationalism
9. Democracy
10. Religion
11. Corporations
12. Money
13. Decibels
14. Aesthetics
15. Freedom
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Copyright
For Chirag
Introduction
During the course of writing this book, I became a parent. I watched with amazement as my baby boy, fresh out of my womb, learnt the need and technique of suckling, for surviving in his new environment. I found that he was not endowed with any primordial instinct to suck on my breast, but he learnt. Thus began his journey, wherein he would use his rational faculty to learn skills to survive in this world.
Survival is a primordial instinct, but most of our instincts or the spontaneous behaviours that we display are not innate. In fact, to deny this is to accept that a person’s character is inherited, which is the basis of every xenophobic argument. Instead, I believe that instincts are a ‘spontaneous rationality’ (or irrationality) developed by our cognitive faculty in response to the environment. And the development of this rationality is volitional—we must want it, nurture it, and learn how to use it.
Thus, there is no predetermined ‘Indian instinct’. In India, our spontaneous behaviour is a rational (or irrational) choice under the overwhelming influence of politics, ambition and religious fervour in the environment.
In every era and everywhere, governance structures—tribes, kingdoms, nation states—were created to provide resources such as food, shelter and safety for the people. Now, in India, we are besotted with the latest news, views, analyses and Twitter wars on party politics instead of the resources the state must provide. We created the concept of corporations and jobs so that we could earn ourselves a comfortable life, but it turns out that often the first half of our life is overpowered by the quest for building a curriculum vitae for a job, and thereafter by the inimitable 24/7 Indian corporate culture. Similarly, we invented religion as a framework by which to lead our lives, yet blinded by our faith we kill each other. A recent survey gives India a high rank in terms of religious hostility, putting it in the company of Syria, Nigeria and Iraq.1
This is why a certain hypothesis has haunted me for several years—that we are willingly entrapped in the institutions of our own making, having abandoned the rationality to realize that we have lost sight of the reasons these institutions were set up in the first place.
The central theme of this book is that, in India these institutions—the government, corporation, religion—have often become sources of the problem, increasing economic inequality and curbing our free will. It is to this environment that we Indians respond, sometimes with rationality and sometimes without. The fifteen essays of this book hold up a mirror to what we have thus become.
This book is not one that could have been written merely sitting at my study desk. Instead it is a consequence of taking on life’s adventures. For this, I thank my parents and my brother for supporting three decades of my unlikely choices. I thank Chirag for sweeping me off my feet—this book is because of him, for him. Thank you, Naveen, for your friendship and for giving me wings in India. Laxman and Rajshree, thank you for your generosity. Sayem, thank you for showing me life. Neelini, I am grateful for your edits. Milee, thanks for your friendship, advice and patience.
Part IINSTINCTS
1Survival
Almost 200 years ago, the Swiss-born natural historian Louis Agassiz invented the premise for every xenophobe’s favourite argument. He said that the three major human races—Whites, Asians and Negroes, as he liked to categorize them—had risen independently from separate ancestral lineages.1 This would mean that a person with a particular skin colour belonged to an altogether different species from someone with a different skin colour. ‘The brain of the Negro is that of the imperfect brain of a seven months’ infant in the womb of a White,’2 Agassiz declared.
As a professor at Harvard University, Agassiz was one of the first to propose that Earth had endured an Ice Age, but he also used his public stature as a scientist to ‘prove’ racism. It was the era of scientific racism, which meant that there were others such as Samuel George Morton who used various so-called ‘scientific’ methods to ‘rank’ human races.3 Despite these contentious claims, or perhaps because of them, Agassiz acquired fame, and at the time of his death in 1873 he was considered America’s leading scientist. There is even a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts; an entire Swiss mountain; the Harvard zoology museum he founded; and a public school named after him.4
Fortunately for us, Agassiz’s argument was debunked by his contemporary from the other Cambridge, in the United Kingdom—the academic Charles Darwin. Darwin suggested—now famously—that all of us had descended from one common ancestor in Africa.5 ‘We are all one family, in that sense,’ he said. Needless to say, Agassiz detested Darwinism.6
But Darwin had actually spoken about apes, not modern man. Moreover, if we go back far enough, we will see that humans share a distant common ancestry with every living thing on Earth, including bacteria and mushrooms. Therefore, it might be more relevant to find out what happened after the first exodus of apes from Africa took place sixteen million years ago. Many apes left for South-East Asia to evolve into gibbons and orangutans, and the ones who stayed on in Africa evolved into gorillas, chimpanzees and humans.7
So what happened after that? How did humans not only survive in Africa from that point onwards, but also go on to inhabit the rest of the world? And if
