The West never left India. The British did.
The Indian Right’s obsession with a glorious past and its cultural xenophobia aren’t doing us any favours. This piece is not a proposition for India to imitate the West. The increasingly fashionable habit, particularly in recent Hindutva rhetoric, views "Western" as a synonym for "unsuitable to India". But the West is sitting in our pockets, ticking on our wrists, cooling our offices, carrying us to work, supplying our electricity, piping water into our homes, running our hospitals, transmitting our television programme. Once you start accepting what Indians actually use, wear, drive, drink, watch, read, and sit upon, the approach is tough to sustain.
Start with Indian politician. He wakes up in an air-conditioned room, turns on the electric light, washes his face with running water, checks his cell phone, and then goes for a shower. He uses a Macbook/iPad or a Lenovo Legion Proto laptop to send emails, conducts Zoom meetings with his bosses or underlings. Then he gets into a car—a BMW or a Range Rover these days—and listens to regional music using Bluetooth. He takes an airplane to address a public meeting to eviscerate ideological enemies on a mic with big speakers. He holds forth in front of cameras. He watches TV, and goes to bed on a mattress manufactured through modern industrial processes. He doesn’t ideologically suspect the teleprompter, which was developed in America. During such perfectly ordinary days, does he ask himself whether the civilisation that produced the objects he uses is Bharatiya enough? Because he knows it isn’t.
Using a smartphone doesn’t make an Indian a Chinaman. Wearing a necktie doesn’t turn a Gujarati businessman into a Brit or Italian. Driving a Toyota doesn’t means that the driver has secretly joined Japan. Nobody considers drinking water from a municipal tap an act of cultural surrender. We understand instinctively that technologies and most objects that cross our borders cease, over time, to have nationality because it isn’t us who invented technology. They did. Take the necktie for example, invented in the 17th-century by Croatians and adopted by the French with je ne sais quoi to spread to Europe and Britain—Mahatma Gandhi wore a suit before his loincloth. Modern watchmaking developed principally in Europe; Indians wear watches without becoming Europeans. The Indian road, with its mixture of buses, scooters, tractors, rickshaws, hatchbacks, luxury SUVs, bicycles, and cows, is not an extension of Detroit or Stuttgart. It is simply an Indian road. It is difficult to understand why politicians and Hindu cultural savants—at the risk of my being called anti-Hindu or anti-India—believe that this principle should apply to objects but not to ideas. Instead of labelling the automobile as a Western intrusion, Indians built a massive automobile industry under Western and Japanese patents, launching them in modern India. The modern municipal water system is a triumph of engineering, sanitation and public health: nobody is even bothered whether the pipe carrying drinking water into his house is Western or Indian. He just wants clean water: ahem, which is an Indian problem. A civilisation does not lose its identity because water arrives through plumbing.
To cook with only Bharatiya veggies can happen only by chucking potatoes, tomatoes and chilli, which are Portuguese arrivals from South America, out of the desi kitchen, without which hardly any Indian meal can be prepared. Indian chefs get Michelin stars and apply Indian culinary traditions to Western recipes. Remember, India has never been a passive recipient of outside influences. The Independence movement used concepts associated with modern constitutionalism, national citizenship, political representation, and national self-determination to challenge British rule. The Indian Constitution is not a rejection of modern democracy in favour of imagined pre-colonial purity. India successfully constructed a Western-style democratic republic, while making its own choices, even if it is claimed as the Mother of Democracy. Why this insecurity? An Indian can wear a dhoti and carry an iPhone without experiencing a philosophical dilemma. He can read both the Gita and Goethe, listen to a Carnatic concert and jazz, practise yoga and undergo modern surgery. He can use a microwave to heat paranthas or sambar. The strength of Indian civilisation lies not in its ability to stay untouched but in its ability to absorb externalism without being corrupted. If a Western idea cannot justify the Indian social context, reject it. If it does, use it. If only part of it works, change it. If an Indian tradition offers something better, use that instead; which is what we exactly did to transform Western objects and ideas it would itself scarcely recognise. Great civilisations survive by staying confident enough to decide what to keep and what to discard. The West is here, and it isn’t going anywhere. Too bad.
