In truth, far from being ‘the only organic race’ of their island, the Sinhala almost certainly migrated there from eastern India. In any case, in later centuries the culture of the island has been influenced and enriched by many races and peoples, among them Tamils, Arabs, the Dutch, the Portuguese and the British, who in religious terms were variously Hindu, Christian, Muslim, and atheist as well as Buddhist. The LTTE were a terrorist organization—it is impossible to defend them. However, if their defeat at the hands of the Sri Lankan army leads to the triumph of Sinhala chauvinism, it will be impossible to defend that, too.
There may be a lesson here for the Nagas, namely, that it is likely that they will get a better—perhaps even a far better—bargain now, when their leader is alive, than might be possible ten or twenty years down the line. It is quite likely that a post-Muivah NSCN will be far less influential and credible than it is now. All the more reason, perhaps, for a deal to be struck and implemented while the leader is still living.
Back in 1966, when the state was strong and the rebels weak, the Indian government refused to rehabilitate Sheikh Abdullah. The break-up of Pakistan in 1971 was likewise the fault mainly of an arrogant and overbearing state. Have the roles been reversed now? Was it that the window of opportunity in Sri Lanka was shut principally because of the dogmatism and insecurity of the rebels? And that the same might now happen in Nagaland? In the several decades since these struggles commenced, tens of thousands of lives have been lost, tens of thousands of families broken. But the dream of an independent homeland seems as distant as ever.
Were this generation of Nagas to put down their weapons, the next generation would reap untold benefits. They would be part of a larger economy in which they would enjoy advantages that other Indians do not. Apart from their facility with English and the advanced status of their women, the Nagas have another great asset, namely, that the landscapes they inhabit are utterly gorgeous. Aside from taking some of the best jobs in the national economy, the Nagas might also attract a healthy stream of tourists to their own homelands.
For more than a decade now, an uneasy truce has prevailed in Nagaland. The NSCN (I-M) and the Government of India have had many rounds of talks, but no agreement has been reached. How can one get Muivah and company to drop the demand for national sovereignty and ask instead for an honourable place within the Indian Union? If, as Jayaprakash Narayan told the Nagas long ago, they can run their own economy and promote their own culture, then why does it matter that they do not have their own sovereign nation? A deeper federalism can also handily serve the aspirations of the Sri Lankan Tamils. With the attributes that the Nagas and the Tamils share, they stand to gain enormously from the forging of an agreement that gives them an honourable place within the constitutional framework of their respective countries.
However, to get the rebels to even drop the sovereignty demand might require a handsome gesture or two from the central Governments of India and Sri Lanka. As some mediators suggested, perhaps the people of Nagaland could have some recognition of their distinctive status on their passport itself—which might say, in their case, not ‘Indian’, but ‘Naga Indian’. Likewise, if it is to convince the Tamils that they are something other than second-class citizens, Colombo should explicitly disavow the earlier enactment making Buddhism ‘the state religion’ of Sri Lanka, while at the same time placing the Tamil language on par with Sinhalese. Other measures will also be necessary—among them, the framing of new laws to allow greater autonomy for the regions concerned, special grants to rehabilitate victims and former combatants, and even—why not?—a public recognition of and apology for the sufferings caused by armed personnel.
VIII
The proposals I have put forward here might meet with scorn and derision, not just from the Nagas and the Tamils, but from my fellow writers and scholars as well. For, as the American critic Lionel Trilling noted long ago, intellectuals have tended to embrace an ‘adversary culture’: standing against the state, against the market, against the Establishment, against anything and everything but themselves. Conciliation and compromise do not come naturally to them.
However, conciliation and compromise were an integral part of the vocabulary and political repertoire of a man to whom I owe the title of this essay, the man whom I can, I think, uncontroversially refer to as the greatest South Asian of them all, Mohandas K. Gandhi. Gandhi knew when to begin a movement, but also when to call it off; when to challenge an opponent, but also when to talk to and seek to understand him. The only thing he was uncompromising about was the use of non-violence.
In many ways, Gandhi was the arch reconciler, the builder of bridges—bridges between Hindus and Muslims, between India and Pakistan, between high castes and low castes, between men and women, between the colonizer and the colonized. Independent India has had many failures, but also some successes. The most conspicuous of these successes are owed to Gandhi’s political followers having honoured his spirit of compromise. India is not—or not yet—a ‘Hindu Pakistan’ because its first prime minister followed Gandhi in promoting religious pluralism. The Indian Constitution provided special privileges for low castes and tribals under the inspiration of Gandhi. Remarkably, the man who piloted this Constitution through the Assembly was himself a lifelong opponent of Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress party. How and why B.R. Ambedkar was chosen as the first law minister of the government of independent India remains a mystery. It has been speculated that Gandhi instructed Nehru and Patel to include Ambedkar in the Cabinet, on the grounds that freedom had come to all of India, not merely to Congressmen. This seems in keeping with Gandhi’s extraordinary combination of personal generosity and political sagacity, whereby he was willing to overlook Ambedkar’s savage denunciations of himself in view of the younger man’s acknowledged abilities as a scholar and administrator.
Among the less adequately recognized of Gandhi’s compromises was the forging of a stable, harmonious, and even affectionate relationship between the United Kingdom and independent India. Certainly, nowhere else have Empire and Colony maintained such a friendship after the sundering of the imperial (and essentially inequitable) tie that once bound them. Consider the bitter relations that have existed—and indeed still exist—between the French and the Algerians, the Dutch and the Indonesians, the Belgians and the residents of the Congo, the Russians and the Poles, the Japanese and the Koreans.
That most Indians do not hate the English is owed largely—one might even say entirely—to Gandhi. In the latter half of 1931, Gandhi visited England to participate in the Round Table Conference. While the conference was in recess, Gandhi spent two weekends at Oxford. He stayed with A.D. Lindsay, the Master of Balliol College, a distinguished political theorist, a socialist, a member of the Labour Party, and a supporter of the Indian independence movement. While at Oxford the Mahatma met with the Indian Majlis and also with the Raleigh Club. His session with the Raleigh Club included this fascinating exchange:
Q. How far would you cut India off from the Empire?
A. From the Empire entirely; from the British nation not at all, if I want India to gain and not to grieve. The British Empire is an Empire only because of India. The Emperorship must go and I should love to be [an] equal partner with Britain, sharing her joys and sorrows … But it must be a partnership on equal terms.
Q. To what extent would India be prepared to share the sorrows of England?
A. To the fullest extent.
Q. Do you think India would unite her fortunes inextricably with England?
A. Yes, so long as she remains a partner. But if she discovers that the partnership is like one between a giant and a dwarf, or if it is utilized for exploitation of the other races of the earth, she would dissolve it. The aim is the common good of all nations of the earth and, if it cannot be achieved, I have patience enough to wait for ages rather than patch up an unreal partnership.
Gandhi’s closest friend was an Englishman, Charles Freer Andrews. While his admirers called him ‘Mah
atma’, ‘Gandhiji’, or ‘Bapu’, and his critics addressed him as ‘M.K. Gandhi’ or ‘Mr Gandhi’, among the few people to address Gandhi by his first name, ‘Mohan’, was this English priest. When Andrews died, in 1940, Gandhi wrote that while the numerous misdeeds of the English would be forgotten, ‘not one of the heroic deeds of Andrews will be forgotten as long as England and India live. If we really love Andrews’ memory, we may not have hate in us for Englishmen, of whom Andrews was among the best and noblest. It is possible, quite possible, for the best Englishmen and the best Indians to meet together and never to separate till they have evolved a formula acceptable to both.’
In the six decades since the Raj ended, the ‘best Englishmen and the best Indians’ have met regularly and amicably—to their mutual advantage. Theirs has been, as Gandhi hoped and worked for, an enduring partnership of equals. Can there be a time when the same can or will be said of Nagas and Punjabis, or Jaffna Tamils and Kandyan monks? It would take a great deal of give and take on both sides, an honest acknowledgement of error, a willingness to compromise, and, perhaps above all, the ability to think of a hopefully harmonious future rather than a bitter and bloody past.
The Naga and Tamil struggles are founded on the principle of identity. These two peoples have a strong sense of who they are and what unites them, this defined by a shared territory, religion, culture and language. It is the denial, perceived and real, of this identity by the nation state and its policies that explain the origin and persistence of the secessionist movement. The key to a solution lies in converting the currency of identity into the currency of interest. The groups that are currently protesting about threats to their identity must be provided with a stake in power and decision-making. That is how, for example, the Solidarity generation in Poland, or the leaders and cadres of the African National Congress in South Africa, were encouraged to move from being rebels and freedom fighters to becoming administrators and governors. But for inspiration, one does not necessarily have to look so far afield. The Dravidian movement in Tamil Nadu, and the Mizo National Front, once stood out for independence as solidly as the LTTE and the NSCN. In the end, however, they dropped the demand for sovereignty, in exchange for a secure place within the federal system.
One may take heart from the history of Tamil Nadu and Mizoram or, indeed, from contemporary Nepal. It is too early yet to say whether this particular South Asian story will have a happy ending. But it has certainly had a salutary beginning. For Comrade Prachanda to embrace multiparty democracy was, in ideological terms, just as difficult as Prabhakaran or Muivah giving up on ‘national self-determination’. Credit must also be given to the parliamentary parties, and perhaps to the elder statesman Girija Prasad Koirala in particular, that they set aside their old animosities and suspicions and welcomed the Maoists into the democratic process.
These examples suggest that for there to have been an honourable peace in Sri Lanka, Velupillai Prabhakaran did not have to become a Mahatma Gandhi. He—or his advisers and well-wishers—could have taken their cues instead from leaders and struggles closer to them in history and geography. Mandela’s ANC was once just as devoted to the cult of the gun. C.N. Annadurai was once just as committed to an independent Tamil homeland—this to be carved out of the Republic of India, rather than the Republic of Sri Lanka. And that other rebel in the jungle, Prachanda, also fought on for years in the hope—and belief—that the struggle would ultimately end in a one-party state dominated by his men. The compromises made by Mandela, Annadurai and Prachanda might now compel the attention of T. Muivah, although he has an exemplar even closer at hand, in Laldenga and the Mizo National Front.
Jayaprakash Narayan liked to say that compromise was impossible only when one side to the dispute was 100 per cent in the wrong. Following this argument, one could not ask the Jews of Germany to compromise with the Nazis. However, in the South Asian conflicts described here, rights and wrongs are distributed more evenly. Sheikh Abdullah once compared Kashmir to a beautiful damsel coveted by two avaricious and amoral men (namely, India and Pakistan). By this he meant that both countries disregarded and at times abused the rights of the Kashmiri people. Meanwhile, since Abdullah’s death, the dispute has been further complicated by the violence and intolerance expressed by Kashmiri jehadis, as in their expulsion of the Pandits in 1989–90. In Sri Lanka and Nagaland too, mistakes and crimes have been committed by all sides. The fact that vice is not the monopoly of a single party alone makes the case for reconciliation and compromise all the more compelling.
In a fine essay on the history of political moderation in the western world, Robert M. Calhoon suggests that ‘moderates are made not born’. They are ‘creatures of the moment, and of circumstance, who move away from antagonistic stances and toward [the] middle ground to achieve a goal or serve a purpose through a wider political advocacy and association’. This definition works well in explaining the moves away from extremism of those great rebels, Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi, or indeed of the ending of repression by their respective rivals, the apartheid regime and the British Raj.
Calhoon also writes that ‘in our own time, moderation rebukes the corrosive partisanship from the Right or the Left’. In our own region, however, Right and Left may be better represented as Rebel and State. It is the task of the moderate, and of moderation, to find common ground between these two actors, thus to replace a regime of suspicion and violence with one based on trust and cooperation.
That said, those who advocate moderation—including the present writer—live more in hope than expectation. Calhoon quotes a passage from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where the Greek sage notes that ‘it is no easy task to find the middle’. Closer home, this sentiment was echoed by C. Rajagopalachari, a close follower and associate of Gandhi, when he wrote to a Quaker friend that ‘those who are born to reconcile seem to have an unending task in this world’. If not in the whole world, at least in South Asia, this region that has been so deeply marked by conflict and antagonism between high caste and low caste, between Hindus and Muslims, between Sinhala speakers and Tamil speakers, between the massed armies of its nation states …
It is precisely because our region is such a cauldron of conflict that a special responsibility devolves on the writer and intellectual. The writer and intellectual has an obligation to the truth; the modern writer and intellectual an additional obligation to democracy and pluralism. For the signal lesson of the twentieth century was that dictatorships of both left and right are equally inimical to human dignity and well-being. Thus, as part of their calling, writers must stand consistently for the right to freely elect one’s leaders, the right to seek a place of residence and company of one’s choosing, the right to speak the language of one’s choice and the right to practise the faith of one’s belief (which may be no faith at all).
These responsibilities are onerous enough, but for the South Asian writer and intellectual there are other obligations still. Because our recent history has been so bloody and divisive, here the writer and intellectual must always be in search of paths that might make our future less bloody, and less divisive. She, and he, should seek, wherever possible, to moderate social and political conflicts rather than to intensify or accelerate them. The extreme positions are well represented and passionately articulated in any case. Rather than take sides on behalf of one caste against another, one religion against another, one nation against another, or to throw oneself in alignment with the state or to be always against the state, the writer and intellectual needs to keep away from an identification with one party to a dispute. Rather, he and she must try to interpret and reconcile opposing positions, to make each side see the truth in the other, thus to urge each party to move beyond dogmatism and self-justification towards acknowledging and embracing the beauty of compromise.
PART II
THE WORD AND THE WORLD
Chapter Ten
The Rise and Fall of the Bilingual Intellectual
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I
r /> This essay is inspired by an argument between the scholar–librarian B.S. Kesavan and his son Mukul that I was once privy to. I forget what they were fighting about. But I recall that the father, then past ninety years of age, was giving as good as he got. At periodic intervals he would turn to me, otherwise a silent spectator, and pointing to his son, say: ‘Makku!’ ‘Paithyam!’ Those were words that Mukul, born in Delhi of a Hindi-speaking mother, did not himself understand. But I did. They meant, roughly and respectively, ‘imbecile’ and ‘lunatic’.
B.S. Kesavan knew that I lived in Bangalore, that both my parents were Tamil, and that one of my great-uncles had been a Tamil scholar. Thus, when his son’s stupidity (real or alleged) could not be adequately conveyed in their shared language, namely, English, he took recourse to his mother tongue, which was also theoretically mine. The emphasis must be on ‘theoretically’. My great-uncle the Tamil scholar used to write postcards asking me to ‘learn Tamil and lead a simple life’. I failed him wholly in the second respect, but have down the years managed to pick up a few dozen words of Tamil, among them makku and paithyam.
B.S. Kesavan was formidably multilingual. He was fluent in Tamil, Kannada and English, spoke Bengali adequately and Hindi passably, and had a good grasp of Sanskrit. No doubt his multilingualism came in handy in his work as the first Indian director of the National Library, his nurturing of a national information system, and his pioneering histories of publishing and printing. His taste for languages was shared by many other Indians of his generation who did not necessarily require those skills in their jobs or careers. My own father, for instance, who was a paper technologist by profession, speaks English and Tamil well, and Kannada and Hindi passably. He also has a reading knowledge of French and German. On the other hand, Mukul Kesavan and I are essentially comfortable in English alone. We can speak Hindi conversationally, and use documents written in Hindi for research purposes. But we cannot write scholarly books or essays in Hindi. And neither of us can pretend to a third language at all.