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144 / Jijñāsā
question are in vogue. (A) The first response practically dismisses India's past as of no value. It asserts that the Indian national identity has to be sought in its contemporary manifestations and future aspirations. Therefore, it is of no real relevance to hark back to India's hoary past, most of which in any case is obsolete and a drag on its path to progress. The sooner India embraces the 'contemporary 'global' culture, the better for it. (B) The second response does not dismiss the relevance of India's past. In the construction of Indian national identity it not only concedes relevance to India's past but considers India's cultural history as crucial. Indian culture according to this response has always been 'composite' in character and it is this character that holds the key to India's national identity.
These two responses are quite different in character; the one can not really combine with the other. It is perhaps a measure of the prevailing lack of clear thinking that seems to govern so much of the contemporary intellectural scene in our country that in the writings of the leading advocates of these two responses we find a dismaying attempt to combine the two. Or, does it reflect the same attitude that the politicians often betray in making use of anything that comes handy to gain political advantage without considering whether it is compatible with their professed standpoint?
The dismissive viewpoint on India's past, in its turn, has two different variations or stances. The first one can broadly be described as Marxist with its theory of a universal and uniform pattern of historical development. Indian history according to it exemplifies exploitation of the downtrodden and an ideology that strove to legitimize regimes of oppression and exploitation. And, the vestiges of Indian past that still linger on to a large extent are crude remainders of feudal setup and exploitation. There is really nothing that can be really called as specifically Indian as such; what may appear as Indian is actually a version or mode of exploitation and an ideology to legitimize exploitation. India thus needs to be taken out of the snares of its feudal past as quickly as possible and put on the road to the universal and inevitable socialistic society.
The other stance can be called the Liberal Western. This is actually another version of the same theme of the inevitable emergence of a uniform global culture. In this stance, however, the global culture that is poised to take over the world is mediated and spurred by the invincible march of rationality, science and technology and the growth of global trade and commerce and the idea of equality and democracy in the domain of politics. This stance also asserts the notion that rationality, science, technology, democracy, equality, etc., all are gifts of the Western civilization. The forward march of these ideas and practices, therefore, represents a gradual Westernization of the world. This notion also believes in the irreversibility of this process of westernization.
Critique of the Marxist & Western Liberal viewpoints:
It is interesting that while in the global context the two above mentioned worldviews are politically and ideologically at daggers drawn, they seem to abet and aid each others designs of denigrating and undermining the relevance of India's past history. This very fact suggests that the primary objective of these two schemes of looking at India's past harbor more of political aims than a pure intellectual enquiry. The current political scenario in the country strongly reinforces this impression. We have been witnessing an interesting collaboration between the Liberal and the Marxist political parties in the governance of the country. It may be mentioned in passing that since the very inception of the socialist movements there has been more than an undercurrent of tension between the evolutionary and revolutionary views and programmes of Socialism, between the pronationalist and the pro-global orientations of Socialism. The confrontations between the erstwhile USSR and China, between China
