The bridge that unites the boomers and millennials of India is change, both sudden and stealthy. In the 1990s, the Boomers’ India became a new economic and cultural entity after Manmohan Singh threw the doors open to the world. The Indian got a new global identity, modern and internationally accepted, even admired. The philosophy of this India was to leave the past behind and look to the future.
The 2000s, however, were the age of stealthy transformation, when we began to ransack the past for identity, or as some said, rediscover it. Reclaim our lost pride became the idiom. But why? A new pride had already been our gestalt. The idea of India became a confused smorgasbord of Amar Chitra Katha, economic regression and state control without the benefits of benevolent governance. What happened beyond politics?
The answer lies in the past, but not ours. The Greek philosophers used mythology to address human metaphysical questions by applying it to the concept of identity. One of them is the Theseus paradox. To cut a long myth short, Athenian prince Theseus after a long voyage entered the labyrinth of King Minos where a monster called the Minotaur lived. Theseus killed the monster and became king of Athens. The Ship of Theseus was stored in an Athens museum to commemorate his bravery.
Over time, some of the timber rotted and were replaced. Greek philosopher Plutarch argued that the analogy can be universal. If the components of any object are replaced one by one over time, is it still the same object? If not, when did it stop being the object? Society, like human bodies, keeps transmuting, discarding old cultural cells and generating new ones until it is no longer the same.
Then came the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes who hypothesised that if the rotten planks were repaired and a new ship was built with them, which is the original Ship of Theseus? Or are both ships the Ship of Theseus? Some savants rubbished the paradox saying that a ship cannot be compared with a person, based on another philosopher John Locke’s reasoning that it’s memory that links humans to their past. Hence, is memory the substance of identity or is it the body? Or a combination of both? But all philosophers missed a basic postulate of identity—the soul that both humans and civilisations possess.
The paradox of current India is the relationship between civilisational memory and people. Over time, Aryans, Dravidians, Arabs, Europeans, Turks, Mughals and the British changed the planks of the ship of Indian identity. Now they are being retrofitted again into a craft alien to philosophers and sages who conceived the original Indian. It would be wiser to refer to their souls as a guide for the journey forward, because nobody has gone ahead by looking backward.
Or has that ship sailed?
Ravi Shankar
ravi@newindianexpress.com