In order for an individual to be ethical, it is important that they have an ethical and just environment around them. Else, there are high chances that an environment that has a general interest in continuing with corrupt practices will bring this individual down. For instance, an entrepreneur needs an ecosystem that allows him to ethically get legal permits, make payments to vendors and so on in an ethical way. If the ecosystem has unsaid rules that bribes must be paid or payments are to be done illegally only, the entrepreneur will find it difficult to get by without submitting to these rules. If a young girl values honesty but lives in a community that would harm her if they discover that she is pursuing an education, a love affair, or a salaried job, she would have two choices: to be dishonest and pursue her ambitions, or to give up on them. In both cases, the environment would have influenced her individual values.
Some people use communities to get results in their individual favour for financial or political gains. For instance, while some Indians will not marry, or even eat or drink from the same vessel as someone of a lower caste, the same individuals will lend other castes support by forming a political alliance to gain power or money (or both) as a merged group, if they see their own individual benefit in such an alliance. Political alliances, such as the Kshatriya–Harijan–Ahir–Muslim and the Ahir–Jat–Gujar–Rajput13 groups, have been driven by the ambitions of a few to garner political power and win elections. Even as the caste system is slowly dissolving in India, caste identities persist and individuals correlate their caste identity with personal ambitions for political and financial gain.
With the trickle-down effect—however painfully slow it is at the moment—of a more equitable economic growth pattern in India, there are chances that there will be greater homogeneity in education, spending power, choices and aesthetics among different communities separated by history, culture, prejudice or social and economic factors. In a society where every individual has equal power to understand, procure and implement action from the same set of choices, the political class will not be able to manipulate ignorance or socio-economic differences, because there will hardly be any. The elite will need to rise on their own merit, not by bullying the rest. It will be a somewhat level playing field for everyone to offer more opportunities as much as to gain, and so the mad scramble to win might abate.
Only equality among individuals can generate empathy among people who do not have any kin, clan or ethnic connections. With empathy, individuals will understand the dilemmas and challenges of the other. They will connect with others on the basis of shared individual values, and not because of the values of a group they were deemed to be part of since birth. Gradually, people will begin to trust those beyond family and community as well.
If this happens in India, those on an equal footing will come together in new groups based on the shared individual values of their members. They will each still be part of several communities, but these will be communities in which members have not identified with each other only due to affiliations by birth. And there is nothing pre-modern about that.References
Durkheim, Émile. 1893. The Division of Labor in Society (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France).
Gupta, Dipankar. 2000. Mistaken Modernity: India Between Worlds (Noida: HarperCollins India).
Indian Express. 2016. Chhattisgarh: 8,582 villages become open defecation free. 16 December.
Lau, Lisa, and Om Prakash Dwivedi. 2014. Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English (New York: Palgrave MacMillan).
National Sample Survey Report. 2016. Most of rural India still opts for open defecation. The Hindu, 21 April.
Varma, Pavan K. 2005. Being Indian: The Truth about Why the Twenty-first Century Will be India’s. (New Delhi: Penguin Books India).
8Nationalism
There is a large and influential consensus about the timing of the birth of nationalism in India. Almost every nationalist historian in India has said that nationalism here was born at the time of India’s awakening for freedom from the British. Subalternists Sumit Sarkar and Ranajit Guha too have deliberately focused on the period of the freedom struggle, emphasizing the role of the masses instead of the elites in developing India’s nationalism.1 Some historians say that nationalism began precisely in 1885 with the formation of the Indian National Congress.2 And others have largely believed that Indian nationalism was conceived and formed by various other political events in India’s freedom struggle, over the period from the last two decades of the nineteenth century right up to 15 August 1947.
There has been another consensus—not just among intellectuals in India but also the world over—about the origin of nationalism. They mostly agree that nationalism arrived in the colonies from Europe.3 Starting with the French Revolution, a wave of nationalism or devotion to one’s country, along with the creation of national symbols, national slogans or values, and citizen rights, spread in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Countries such as Germany, Italy and Romania were being formed by uniting regional states under a common national identity, whereas others such as Greece, Switzerland, Poland and Bulgaria emerged after uprisings against the Ottoman Empire and Russia. A European import, this brand of nationalism was supposedly bequeathed by former colonial powers to the lands they had once ruled over. It is often believed that nationalism was one of Europe’s most useful gifts to the rest of the world.
Not just India, but other erstwhile European colonies such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Algeria struggled to establish their own nationhood. As their people laid down their lives to become free, they
