YOU CAN'T BUILD A COHERENT SOCIETY ON HETERODOXY:

Indian culture, heterodoxy under scrutiny: a review of The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen (Kedar Deshpande, Asia Times)

For Sen, the widespread legacy of heterodoxy in Indian traditions is critical for understanding the country's past. "Indian traditions in mathematics, logic, science, medicine, linguistics or epistemology may be well known to the Western specialist, but they play little part in the general Western understanding of India. Mysticism and exoticism, in contrast, have a more hallowed position in that understanding." (p 155)

This persistent tendency to emphasize only the "exotic" negates the rational, scientific and non-religious (often openly agnostic or atheistic) schools of thought that pervade ancient Indian scholarship and philosophy.

Sen's frustration, however, is not limited to Western academics. He also condemns Hindu fundamentalists who aim to rewrite India's past and modify its present to reflect only Hindu beliefs and traditions. "[The Bengali poet] Rabindranath Tagore thought that the 'idea of India' militates 'against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one's own people from others'. Through its attempt to encourage and exploit separatism, the Hindutva movement has entered into a confrontation with the idea of India itself. This is nothing short of a sustained effort to miniaturize the broad idea of a large India - proud of its heterodox past and its pluralist present - and to replace it by the stamp of a small India, bundled around a drastically downsized version of Hinduism."

Sure, and being conquered by the Moors and recognizing the heterodox nature of the states that were brought together under one sovereign was critical to understanding Spain's past in 1492, but imposing an orthodoxy was what gave it a glorious future. If India tries just aping the liberal democratic forms it has inherited from actual English colonization and from virtual American hegemony without providing any spiritual and cultural content of its own then it will run into the same problems that plague secularized Europe. Better to start out with a reformed Hinduism that emphasizes its monotheism--real or imagined--and can serve as the moral basis for a decent society, while retaining something of the henotheism that allows for tolerance of other religions.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 1, 2005 8:01 AM