Prof Bhaskar elucidates that Bharat’s timeless structure is a resilient art of living, anchored in indigenous knowledge and self-regulation amidst evolving complexity, for Different Truths.
Before I pen what follows, I take the basic assumption that the basic structure of Bharat has remained unchanged since time immemorial. This basic structure is embedded in the art of living of the people, understood as ‘common’, with an uncommon understanding of how to live even in adverse conditions and circumstances. People have their ‘lokvidya’, or indigenous knowledge, that they derive from practices in real life.
The additional assumption that I take here is a non-specific beginning of the art of living of people since they came out of cave life. The social categories were yet to be understood by religion-caste-region and all that other than some understanding about gender. The beginning was thus simple relative to the complex art of living since the evolution of private property.
The Idea
No idea is abrupt – it evolves through the activities performed by people. If I narrow down the time span and begin from 1947, when India, that is Bharat, got formal independence, then what follows may make some sense. This does not, of course, imply that the period before 1947 was irrelevant. What we have post-1947 were derivatives of what was there pre-1947.
Instead of narrating what Bharat is not, let me offer the idea of what it is and hence what best may be attempted for India’s civilisation (Bharat sabhyata). Despite cultural hazards and adverse inclusion of some people by caste and gender, Bharat was generally a ‘smiling Bharat’ that was too soft to resist the invasions of aggressors and conquerors of the land called Bharat. The geographic map and demography continued to change along with the movement and mobility of people in search of knowledge, trade, and living. Changing demography was not seen as an intimidating factor for centuries. Post-partition, in 1947, based on religion put forward before the rulers, specifically the state, the hard responsibility of fixing who the permanent residents were and who would be eligible to live in Bharat, that is, India.
Bharat was a smiling Bharat, the smile that gradually started evaporating, embroiled with the rising size of the population; that is, the statistical conversion of people, society got replaced by the state. A section of the population came to realise the hard realities of living by being unemployed or underemployed, being the victims of intolerable inequality, absolute poverty, gender oppression and all that. Smiling people die prematurely in Bharat but hardly question it, for they live in a previous birth and imagine a future birth. This stabilises the society and India’s civilisation.
What Idea is New?
This is where we start afresh. This is a Bharat where people continue to share smiles, smile consciously, and understand the processes, if not the consequences, readily. This is Bharat, where women feel safe and where children experience an equal initial condition to bud. This Bharat was not in a Darwinian frame, and it cannot be in that frame – it accommodated the destitute, the paupers, the insane, and the challenged. This Bharat has a built-in social economy where the money market works but does not determine human life. Most of these Bharats are not fliers – they walk long for pilgrimage in belief. Often, they are delinked from science or a scientific outlook, and they draw a trajectory of their art of living that is ‘satiety’ by simple material living. Nothing much has changed over the centuries in this art.
Social Division
With respect to rising population and changing material conditions of life, a tendency comes for the people to get different formations or groups in whatever forms these are understood, like caste groups, religious groups, and gender groups, apart from the unrecorded history of Adivasi groups. India’s civilisation remained united with non-homogeneity. A rising number also formed linguistic groups, with variations in food habits, dress, different housing conditions and even non-permanent houses for some. People lived in general peace and happiness.
State Question
The problems cropped up once the state intervened to determine how people would live by different parameters – people got confused and started to follow the state, obeying the laws and rules of which they were hardly a part or the cause of the formulation of those rules. Of course, the state came as a necessary evil – a reconciliatory institution to settle disputes between the people of diverging interests. The social vision of peaceful local living got dipped in a robust nation-state vision.
The state is inescapable for the people, and the state seems incorrigible, for it shoulders the responsibility to correct the deviations in society. In the process, the state enters deeply into the social structure and often overlooks the necessity of non-homogeneity as a necessary condition of unity in ‘diversity’.
Symbiosis
The symbiotic relationship between the natural components in human living, like the society or its different wings, on the one hand, and man-made components, like the state, gets disturbed once the state overpowers by imposing ideas that were or are not integral parts of the society, like preaching ‘social distancing’, searching for unwelcome people, spreading religious venom, spreading irrelevant issues for public consumption, and so on.
India’s civilisation is too soft to accept hard behaviour. Its geography-demography is too large to be regulated by a single ruler, be it in the remote past or in recent times. Most of the time, people remain self-regulated by self-engagement, rituals, local living and all that. The idea of Bharat lies in this self-regulation that is not distanced from interdependence and reciprocity.
Bharat as an idea lies in its greatness – in Buddha-Chaitnya-Tagore-Vivakananda-Gokhle-Vidyasagar-Ramakrishna. In mythology, it could convert Ratnakar into Valmiki and Chandashok into Dharmashok. Even if history cannot be recreated, I nourish a vision that the nation rebuilds not only to guide the state but also to open a wide canvas where people understand that they live in peace and happiness.
Picture design by Anumita Roy
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