The idea of India as a contemporary imagination, as a creative form of life, has withered considerably. One feels that it functions like a majoritarian nation and wants to be immaculate as a developing state. Yet India has almost become autistic in dealing with the Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars.
India has lost its sense of civilisation, trading heritage like a commodity and reaching rigor mortis as a nation. Our sense of pluralism and diversity is quickly eroding. Concepts such as security have corroded our sense of peace. Peace has become a technocratic issue, not a philosophical and metaphysical one. Between Ajit Doval’s idea of internal security and S Jaishankar’s foreign policy, all we produce are tutorial college imperatives. Our failure in pacifist imagination is stark, empty and sordid.
One thing that our sense of civilisation needs is our sense of peace. Our vision must be playful, ready to outthink China rather than stumble idiotically before it. A Dalai Lama has a greater sense of laughter when confronting China than a Narendra Modi or a Rajnath Singh mumbling before it. China can eat into our confidence while Tibet can still face it playfully.
Movements such as the Pugwash struggle against nuclear energy must be reworked as moral imaginations. One must confess that major political movements are rare today. The Occupy movement in the US and the Indigenista movement from Brazil are among the few major philosophical exercises. India needs some desperate relearning to save it as a democratic imagination. Our Gandhianism is active in anniversary mothballs, but lacks everyday imagination. Where do we begin?
There are fascinating experiments that need wider publicity and discussion. The Buddhist imagination which has reworked the idea of compassion must be debated. Even Stanford University has initiated a course on compassionate economics. The Dalai Lama has been working with MIT and Harvard to create a truly non-violent science, collaborating with exemplars such as Matthieu Ricard, Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana. These scientists have sought to creatively link life, livelihood and lifestyle with playful metaphysics.
The Jain religion’s attempts to link food and peace also need wider articulation. Gandhi can be revived with a new set of experiments confronting the new truths of our time. India must create a new pedagogy by articulating the poetics of the Anthropocene as part of the metaphysics of peace.
While security, like Malthusianism, can be a dismal science, peace must celebrate life. A Gandhi, a Tutu, a Havel and a Dalai Lama must help restore the life-giving imaginations of peace. Peace cannot be circumscribed as a rigid catechism. It must emerge as an efflorescence of folklore and civil society.
Civil society experiments around peace are critical. We need to rewrite the directive principles of state policy to create a peace constitution that goes beyond the correctness of the Japanese constitution. Such experiments deal not just with war but with memory, violence and the challenge of genocide. A constitution which says no to nuclear energy and yes to the festival of nature in a life-giving sense would be a new beginning. The body would become a site for a new ethical creativity, of an India alert in combating torture and genocide. The everydayness of genocide as an extension of law and order politics has to be subverted. Only new imaginations contesting evil and new acts of courage can challenge the corrosiveness of violence.
We often forget that Indian nationalism was more a theory of pedagogy than of politics. Our great nationalists such as Gandhi, Tagore and Annie Besant dreamt the dreams of childhood. Childhood as Utopia was a prelude to peace. Others such as Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner and Jiddu Krishnamurti added to the creativity of childhood as an alternative possibility. One forgets that our first sociologist, Patrick Geddes, theorised on peace by reconstructing knowledge. For Geddes, the architectonics of knowledge and city plans became preludes to a holistic peace. It is time to revive the memory of such experiments.
Peace has its own literary demands, both oral and written. It demands that storytelling matches the theories of peace. Peace is a performance that inspires future action. Yet in a deep way, peace conveys a sense of everydayness. Historian Shahid Amin wrote an obituary of Natalie Davis, noting how historians such as Ginzberg and Davis, by capturing everydayness and ordinary people, sculpted the basis of a living peace.
As it stands, the peace movement needs three virtues to capture and sustain it—compassion, pluralism and a deep sense of dialogue. Peace is a form of life that needs both everyday realism and the poetics of a future myth. Peace cannot be reduced to a technical aspect of game theory, tactically moving battalions and armaments. It is this worldview that we have lost as we squander ourselves in G20 games.
We need to go back to our roots and culture. To create a different peace, copying Henry Kissinger’s textbook might give us temporary respite, but peace needs deeper axiomatics, a symbolism and faith rooted in culture. This is why Gandhi, Ramana Maharshi and Ramakrishna went back to the metaphysics of the body. Only a sacramental notion of the body can challenge the banality of genocide and the indifference of obsolescence. Contempt for the body becomes contempt for peace as a possibility.
Finally, peace must be seen as a form of knowledge and memory. Geddes argued that new theories of holistic interdisciplinary knowledge were a preface to peace. Discussing World War I, he argued that modern science should not become a goose-stepping science. What was needed was a post-Germanic science and Geddes suggested that Gandhi and Jagdish Chandra Bose were the first of the post-Germanic incarnations. Post-Germanic science is tuned to soil, energy, civics and childhood. It is this kind of insight that we lost as the nation became a nation state. We must remember it was not just the Battle of Waterloo that was fought on the playing fields of Eton. Peace, too, begins with dreams of play and epistemology. It is this insight that universities have to capture to go beyond the dismal science of security and surveillance that masquerades in place of peace. One has to search for metaphors, new imaginaries, new ethics and new civics to discover the creativity in the relation between the world and peace.
Shiv Visvanathan
Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations