Wells, Spencer. 2007. A family tree for humanity. https://www.ted.com/talks/spencer_wells_is_building_a_family_tree_for_all_humanity.
Wood, Michael. 2008. The Story of India (Random House).
2Evolution
While India was mounting its freedom struggle, many of the country’s nationalist leaders were living and studying in Europe, where modernity was the essence of the times. The Europeans had developed a missionary zeal for social change ever since their fifteenth- and sixteenth-century explorers had brought back with them reports of the ‘backward’ societies they had discovered in the rest of the world, which badly needed to change their ‘barbaric’ ways and become civilized and ‘modern’.1
Contrary to these beliefs in Europe, the march for social progress in India had a very distinct character in which tradition and modernity would not be divorced from each other. There was so much to fix when political freedom was gained, and it was felt that both tradition and modernity could help lift us out of our miserable condition. We were not just poor, we were infected with several social illnesses such as female infanticide, child marriage, dowry and sati. We were also burdened with a terribly hierarchical society divided by caste, and our wonderfully diverse communities had developed cracks along religious lines. In addition, our self-confidence had been battered by the British, who ruled us for two centuries with their misplaced assumption of racial supremacy. India’s nationalist leaders, led by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, set aside their European learnings at least in this context; even though they agreed that some beliefs had to be discarded, the traditions that nurtured us and made us who we were had to be preserved.
In Europe, social evolution meant successive, homogeneous and graded stages of development—a view established by the British evolution scientist Charles Darwin and philosopher Herbert Spencer, among others. In India, however, we made a deliberate choice to plan social progress such that our diverse communities would retain their distinct characters. We created an unusual political structure, a federation of states, in which each state was defined territorially by the cultural characteristics of its people. We decided to make laws to protect our minorities and their rights to a distinct script and culture, as well as the right to establish their own educational institutions. We even chose twenty-two constitutionally recognized languages instead of one. Indeed, we were influenced by the West in our project of nationhood—more on that in a subsequent essay in this book2—but we did not borrow their normative social project of modernity.
The Preamble of the Indian Constitution clearly laid out this objective. The aim, it said, was ‘to secure to all its citizens social, economic and political justice; liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; equality of status and opportunity, and to promote among them fraternity so as to secure the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation’.3
How much of that objective have we achieved within our framework where tradition and modernity coexists?
According to India’s most recent census almost four out of ten Indians were illiterate4 in 2015 133.5 million families were earning less than Rs 500 per month5 and by 2017 as many as 163 million people did not have access to safe drinking water.6 Our girls are unsafe, in part because of the skewed sex ratio of 940 females per 1000 males,7 and forty-five million women are missing in our country because we kill our girl babies.8 There has also been progress. Famines have been eliminated, life expectancy at birth has doubled from 32 years in 1947 to 66 years in 20129 and literacy has risen from 16 per cent in 1951 to 74 per cent (but female literacy is still at 65 per cent).10
However, some of the most downtrodden sections of the population—lower castes, religious minorities, Dalits and tribals—have gained the least from the nation’s progress.
In Hinduism, India’s majority religion, the caste or varna of an individual is predetermined by birth. In addition to the four historical varnas, most Hindus also belong to about 3000 contemporary sub-castes or jatis, many of which are social, occupational—the cobbler and weaver castes, for example—or geographic.11 Brahmins (priests, teachers) are at the top of the four-caste hierarchy, followed by Kshatriyas (landholders, warriors, rulers). Vaishyas or banias (businessmen) come third, while Shudras (labourers, artisans) are last. The three upper castes have governed the country for 3000 years, even though about half of India belongs to the Shudra caste.12 Besides this, 8.6 per cent of the population is tribal, and more than 16 per cent is made up of the casteless or ‘untouchables’. These are some of the communities that have barely seen an improvement in the quality of life in the past seven decades.
Nowhere else on earth is a human being considered so repugnant to be deemed untouchable. And no other society has a hierarchy as rigid as the Indian caste system. Given at birth as a public marker of one’s status in society, a lower-caste name is carried around like a burden.
An ‘untouchable’ has no choice but to remain so all his life—in India, you can change your religion, but not your caste or ‘castelessness’. What does progress mean to him, then? An improvement in his caste status is not possible, so what are the other ways in which he can improve his life? Essentially, the issue of choice in social ‘progress’ in India is highly problematic because it raises the moral question of who determines progress—the agent of social change or the subject of it? Who decides that progress is needed, the direction it should take, and what it should look like? If the choice of progress is made by the supposed agents of change—the government, the private sector, not-for-profit agencies, religious organizations and so on—does that not simultaneously restrict the freedom of choice of the subject, the individual or the community in question? Moreover, ironically, if others are making choices for the individual, where is the progress? Isn’t progress the ability to make a well-informed
