There is something profoundly perverse in contemporary politics: those who shout loudest about defending civilisation and culture are those whose conduct is most conspicuously divorced from both.
The phenomenon is not confined to India. Islamists invoke an imagined purity of Islamic civilisation while practicing violent intolerance. Christianity has a long history of projecting a ‘superior’ Christian civilisation, while engineering atrocities across the world. In India, the contradiction is increasingly visible in the political appropriation of Hindu identity: the kanwadias, for example, have become a spectacle of religious assertion and of coercive and obscene public behaviour, while the vocabulary of Hindutva, Sanatan, and civilisational greatness is used to legitimise an aggressive repudiation of civility.
The fundamental confusion is between cultural and civilisational history, on the one hand, and living culture and civilisation, on the other.
India possesses an extraordinary civilisational inheritance. Its achievements in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, literature, architecture, medicine, and the arts are indisputable. Its ancient traditions of argument, scepticism, dissent, and intellectual contestation are extraordinary.
But the achievements of people who lived centuries or millennia ago are not the achievements of those who merely occupy the same geographical space today.
We cannot claim Aryabhata’s mathematics, Kalidasa’s genius or the intellectual achievements of ancient India simply because we were born here. Civilisation is not hereditary property.
A civilisation survives not because its ancestors were great, but because its descendants are capable of greatness.
Contemporary India is increasingly substituting ancestral pride for contemporary achievement. We celebrate Nalanda while engineering a collapse of educational standards; invoke ancient philosophical traditions while public discourse rewards abuse; boast of vasudhaiva kutumbakam while cultivating hostility towards specific ‘outgroups’; invoke a tradition of debate while treating disagreement as betrayal.
The past has simply become an instrument for avoiding responsibility for the present.
Culture, meanwhile, is reduced to symbols—dress, food, ritual, festivals, monuments, and slogans. But the essence of culture is reflected in whether disagreement produces argument or assault; whether public spaces belong equally to everyone; whether citizens can live differently without becoming objects of hatred.
The kanwadia who believes religious devotion entitles him to intimidate another citizen, the Islamist who believes faith entitles him to suppress unbelief, and Christian extremists who believe righteousness entitles them to impose their dominance over others, are separated by theology and history; but they share a deep pathology: the conversion of a complex civilisation into a closed political identity.
The scheme behind this is Orwellian. Political control increasingly depends not merely on coercion, but on controlling language and historical memory. Nationalism is obedience; patriotism is the absence of dissent; culture is conformity; history is grievance; and dissent is anti-national. Through these, authoritarian proclivities are socialised: vocal sets of citizens dictate what others should or should not eat; who they should or should not marry, how they should practice their faith; what they should read; and what particular opinions they must hold.
But a confident civilisation does not fear difference; an insecure ideology does.
India’s civilisational history provides powerful resources against this insecurity. It is a history of encounters, migrations, arguments, accommodations, and transformations. India’s strength was not uniformity, but its capacity to absorb and transform differences through intellect.
The question for Indians today is not what our ancestors achieved, but what we are doing.
Will future generations admire our universities, literature, science, institutions, and public culture? Or will they see a technologically capable society that squandered its energies in manufactured cultural antagonisms?
There is nothing wrong with pride in India’s past. But if we admire intellectual achievement, we must produce it. If we admire philosophical argument, we must promote free discourse. If we admire pluralism, we must practice it. If we admire civilisation, we must behave civilly.
The truly civilised society does not need to proclaim its civilisation. Its character is visible in its institutions, intellectual life, public conduct and, above all, in the space it permits for those who disagree with it.
Inheritance is not achievement. Towering civilisations in history have collapsed into disorder and ignominy. The only civilisation that ultimately matters, is the one we ourselves create.
ajaisahni@gmail.com
