At a special cabinet meeting this January, the defence minister proclaimed that India had merely obtained the body of freedom in 1947, and the body politic received its soul only in 2024. The man who gave it the soul was Narendra Modi. It required a Shankaracharya’s wit to wonder whether it was Ram or Modi who was being consecrated, given the fanfare.
Yet, one has to recognise that Modi has reshaped our sense of India by altering the very idea of India. The plural, informal, syncretic, playful sense of civilisation has given way to the puritanical nation-state as a monolithic entity. Governance today speaks a language alienated from democracy. The nation-state has grown many layers to not only be a developmental state but a national security state. Democracy has become majoritarian to serve the surveillance state.
One has to recognise that this governance model did not encourage much debate. Governance was elaborated like a catechism and a set of diktats summarised the administrative wisdom of the state. This was claimed to be a Sardar Patel inheritance—in doing so, it co-opts and usurps the Iron man of India.
The nation-state was no longer what nationalism dreamt of. The idea of culture, which was almost anarchic, was being rationalised to serve the state. The annals of administration appeared tutorial-college-style as a set of listless techniques. The transition from India as a nation to the nation-state to a national security state was stark in creating shifts in foreign policy. The institutional changes that accompanied it were tacitly articulated. For example, science was now an accompaniment to a securitarian state, and applied science became the need of the hour. The project as a working style became the mode of productivity.
Between nationalism and applied science, the university as a dissenting academy of ideas became a casualty. The idiom of science is no longer speculative but directional. Dissent no longer adds to the idea of democracy. The nation-state has achieved a new panopticisation of thought.
As dissent as a value is devalued, majoritarianism became a twin to governance. What we are seeing is a changing idea of nation and university. A cadre-based political system transformed an open set of institutions into a strict delivery schedule. As a result, the freewheeling, playful, argumentative dissenter was considered anti-national.
Once the idiom of freedom changed, one needed to change the idiom of culture to accommodate it. Today, the mandir and its inauguration are political tools. As such, it creates a new vision and a new mission around the current regime. This is an attempt to use religion instrumentally. It portrays it both as a theological and technocratic exercise. But despite all the folklore and conscious semiotic advertisement, the new mandir, while evoking memory, lacks the full power of myth. India, which one was once a syncretic society where Hinduism was a way of life—a plural being—now succumbs to the civics of monotheism. One does not see moments coming which emphasise a new spirituality.
Religion has a sense of magic and spirituality, a sense of surprise. Religion and spirituality are personal and supra-social. It can’t be state-sponsored. Even the Ram Rajya being created appears impoverished in an iconic sense, Ram is being constructed differently. Ram was always presented as an adult—a language of childhood does not accompany these descriptions. Also, Tulsidas has become the official script, and the 300 Ramayans that A K Ramanujan and V Raghavan talked about disappeared into thin air.
The consecration created a didactic Ram. Many families sensed this strongly as the celebrations unfolded. Critics found what suffused the consecration was a different memory—the celebrated idea of a playful Ram from our childhood had disappeared. The playful-yet-ethical Ram that accompanied storytelling is receding in conversations. Ayodhya—the city that was once considered borderless and existed only in our hearts—now becomes a civic, geographical location. The power myth that accompanied Ramayan, and enabled it to be a multiple narrative, has become an official text. Such a legislated Ram is difficult to digest.
What challenged it was the childhood memory of Ram Lalla as a child. I was thinking of my own childhood. My father’s powerful voice would resonate with shlokas, adding a sense of realism and resonance to the narrative. This same voice was, however, equally open to Shakespeare and Greek mythology. One realised that the Ram Lalla being consecrated in Ayodhya was being challenged by the oral memory of childhood. A rupture of memory interrupted what the event tried to impose. The fundamental mistake was to think that theology has to be theocratic and religion cadre-based. Spirituality can’t be cadre-based. I hope the latest event will trigger the creation of new spaces for the orality of our imaginations.
Oddly, in this process, our democracy has lost its playfulness. Both Ramayan and democracy as myths have become listless. The syncretic power and dialogicity of religions are being lost. Watching the new creations as a pastiche of imaginations, one realised there was a semiotic power to it. Semioticians have a word for it— French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called it simulacra—which is not real, but forces itself to be considered as such. I would suggest the current situation is more aligned to Jorge Luis Borges’s idea of imaginary beings. There is no map to facilitate territory, but a map which creates an imaginary being that claims territoriality. A reconciliation of cultures is required to erase this disruption.
When we talk of the necessity of unity, we realise what we are seeing is a disruption of the symbolic imagination of India. What is being created is a monolith which Indian pluralism and semiotics will take centuries to exorcise. In the meantime, democracy, our other great creation, will bear the costs of this disappearance of playfulness.
I have been feeling that the compassionate Ram we know has been sent into exile. This might be a new wait for the return of that Ram. The road ahead is daunting for both the futurist and the believer.
(Views are personal)
Shiv Visvanathan, Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations