Reading Pavan Varma: “we are not a parvenu civilisation”
Extracts from a thought-provoking interview of Pavan Varma by Kanchan Gupta: (emphasis added):
…“Those who have never been colonised can never really know what it does to the psyche of a people. Those who have been are often not fully aware of — or are unwilling to accept — the degree to which they have been compromised,†he writes in this book. That, in a sense, is the theme of Becoming Indian.
Pavan K Varma:…I must confess I profess a fair degree of anguish at our low threshold of satisfaction and self-congratulation. Because we are not only a nation, we are a civilisation. We have 5,000 years of history, antiquity, peaks of refinement, assimilation, diversity …
…And I believe in the reappropriation of our cultural space without chauvinism or xenophobia. This is all the more important because we are simultaneously in an aggressive phase of globalisation where the subtext in the field of culture is often co-option, where the victim is the last to know. And, when the educated are relatively rootless, that co-option becomes all the more easier. So that, essentially, is the paradigm of the book.
…There has been an oversimplification of what I have to say in my book. One is that I am against English. I am not. I am not for the imposition of Hindi. I am just saying that there must be respect given to our languages and while English is an indispensable language of communication, specially to help us interface with a globalising world, it cannot be given primacy over the language of our culture.
There is a language of communication and there is a language of culture. The language of culture is a window to your history, mythology, folklore, proverbs, idioms, to your creativity … and it’s the language in which we cry and laugh.
KG: Do you believe English is still a foreign language in India?
PKV: I genuinely believe that while it is a language of communication which has been indigenised in India, it can never take the place of our natural languages. And, badly spoken English cannot become the lingua franca of a country which is so rich in its linguistic heritage.
…I don’t take any special credit, to see that no nation can sit on the high table of the world as we aspire without giving respect and pride to their own culture and languages. So when we try to be like them at the cost of being who we are, that forces India to become a caricature. I have served all across the world and I have seen this happen.
The whole point is that you have to be an authentic spokesman of your own milieu. Today, I believe that as far as our general cultural scene goes, Kanchan, mediocrity, mimicry, rootlessness and tokenism have become features which we need to introspect about. I don’t say this with anger, I say it calmly.
Look at the state of our humanities departments, not an original work! This is the country of Nalanda? Doctoral theses are being written with footnotes by foreign scholars. Look at the state of our literature, the man who won the Bharatiya Gnanpeeth told me his books sell less than a thousand copies.
…Look at the state of classical dance… I mean I have been a cultural administrator also. Top exponents of a parampara which goes back 3,000 years have to telephone friends for days before a performance to fill a hall when the entrance is free. Look at the state of classical music, the raga represents a 4,000-year-old parampara and it is a very delicate structure… the elaboration of the mood the gradual vistaar and the drut… Today we have eminent musicians performing like adolescent pop stars, catering to the lowest common denominator of an audience.
Now, I am not against pop culture…Mature civilisations nurture both. We cannot be reduced to a sterile simplicity that it is either popular culture or nothing else at all. So these are things we need to think about.
…Whether at the level of the state or at the level of the common man or at the level of the artiste and our creative people, there needs to be something that jolts us out of our complacency. Because, as I said, we are not a parvenu civilisation. We were the benchmark of civilisational excellence, Kanchan. I was amazed when I read it, 200 years before the birth of Jesus Christ, Bharata wrote the Natyashastra, 6,000 Sanskrit shlokas not on any particular art … a meditation on aesthetics, what constitutes rasa.
…
KG: You also talk of the mimic men!
PKV: You see mimicry is a natural consequence of rootlessness. People mimic when they are not secure in their own anchorage and my worry is that for a great deal of the educated in India today there is that rootlessness and therefore that mimicry.
KG: You are also harsh with Rammohun Roy…
PKV: I have used Rammohun Roy as an example to show how the well-intentioned leader in the colonial phase needed to caricature his own civilisation in order to win the approbation of the ruler. First of all, his movement against ills within his own society and religion, especially sati, was a well-intentioned crusade. But if you read his letter to the Viceroy, he first devalues his language, the learning of philosophy and metaphysics, and without a doubt they struck the right chord.
And, as you know, when he went to London he actually argued in the House of Commons for the permanent residency in India of the British and a mixed community through inter-marriage between both. So Rammohun Roy, as I say in my final paragraph, shows that people are products of their times. Colonialism was a hugely, hugely impacting influence on the lives of our well-intentioned leaders…
…
KG: Today we have crossover sahibs who subscribe to the idea of being global citizens, world citizens. For them, the Indian identity becomes baggage.
PKV: I would say I honestly believe in today’s time, the authentic global citizen is one who has the tools to interface with a globalising world is one who is rooted in his own milieu, his own civilisation. Because it is only that person who is rooted in his own milieu who can be a confident interlocutor with the world. Otherwise, we are producing clones.
Read the interview in full here and don’t miss the book (I’m hoping to get my hands on it in the next few weeks).
Related Posts:
Of Bangalore, Bengaluru and Fractured Identities
An Indian Identity in a Globalizing world
UPDATE: From a recent interview of Pavan Varma
“India is not only a nation..but it is a civilisation..A civilisation that goes back 5000 years..(It has) antiquity, continuity, assimilation, diversity and underlying that diversity, a great essential unity….You must understand what is the impact and legacy of colonialism in the cultural sphere
What was lost and what was gained? What has been the cultural loss?
Colonialism is not about the physical subjugation of the people – it is about the colonisation of the mind..
There is no project in British colonialism which has succeeded more spectacularly than Macualay saying, “we have to create an elite in our image that is black in colour but brown englishmen..”
Listening to my ex senior colleague from the IFS, Pavan Varma on his book, “BECOMING INDIAN: The Unfinished Revolution of CULTURE and IDENTITY”. Â Pl also read and share this extract from his book:
For all the easy declarations many of us make about English being an Indian language, the fact is that it is not.
We use it, it serves a purpose, it is of great benefit in the globalized world and should be available to everyone, not just the elite. But it is false and damaging to forget how it was brought to and imposed on India.
Many of us have mastered it now, and ‘read, speak and dream’ in it, but which one of us did this as a conscious choice ? Â By mixing Hindi, Tamil, Bengali or Marathi words and phrases with English, we don’t make the language our own.
The emotional and cultural life of an entire subcontinent – the romance of our songs and poetry, the complex web of the extended family, the particular realities of our geography and climate – is alien to the language that has been with us barely three centuries. For much of what is central to our psyche, English has no words.”
Image courtesy: Kanchan Gupta
Pavan K Varma in conversation with Kanchan Gupta
‘English cannot be given primacy over the language of our culture’
My first encounter with Pavan K Varma, or rather his writing, was when I reviewed his book Krishna: The Playful Divine many
years ago. Before reading the book, I had this image of him in my mind which later proved to be entirely wrong. I had
thought of Pavan as a stuffed shirt, a self-obsessed and utterly boring member of the exalted, twice-born Indian Foreign
Service. Half way through Krishna, I had begun to doubt whether I had the right impression of the author; by the time I
finished reading the book, I knew I was wrong. No stuffed shirt would have written a book like that. When I finally met
Pavan, which was some years later, I realised he was a cut above his colleagues in the IFS, a class apart from those who
represent India abroad. At an open air Hindustani classical music concert where Kishori Amonkar was in full flow and all of
us had lost track of the hour of the night, Pavan taught me, with great élan, how to appreciate the finer nuances of Raga
Nand Kalyan which I would have missed otherwise.
One of our finest diplomats, Pavan K Varma remains rooted in all things Hindustani — from culture to clothes to language.
And that is evident in the series of books he has written exploring the mindset and worldview of the Indian middle classes.
A gifted writer — he makes his point without belabouring it repeatedly — he is what may be called a ‘thinking bureaucrat’,
which could be mistaken as an oxymoron by those acquainted with our bureaucracy and babus. The Great Indian Middle Class and
Being Indian fetched Pavan, and deservedly so, critical acclaim as a commentator with profound thoughts on the past, the
present and the future. His new book, Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity, proves that praise
for his earlier work was not misplaced. It’s a brilliant, incisive exposition of how colonialism has moulded the way we look
at ourselves, our culture, and the world. “Those who have never been colonised can never really know what it does to the
psyche of a people. Those who have been are often not fully aware of — or are unwilling to accept — the degree to which they
have been compromised,†he writes in this book. That, in a sense, is the theme of Becoming Indian.
I met Pavan for a long adda on a lazy late spring afternoon in New Delhi during which we discussed his new book. What he had
to say, as always, was scintillating. Below are excerpts from that unstructured discussion:
Kanchan Gupta: So tell us, what prompted you to write this book? To take the middle class series nearer to a conclusion or
something else…
Pavan K Varma: Essentially, after 60 years of independence, I thought the time had come for a cultural audit. This audit
entails two things. One is a rigorous analysis of colonialism because, as I write, colonialism is not about the physical
subjugation of a people but the colonisation of their mind. And while a political audit takes place after the Union Jack
comes down and an economic audit takes place to take stock of what is lost and what is gained, a cultural audit is something
that does not take place … this is something which is common to all colonised countries… to, in a sense, recolonise the
mind. So, it is both a rigorous analysis of colonialism and a meditation on the state of culture today in our country.
I must confess I profess a fair degree of anguish at our low threshold of satisfaction and self-congratulation. Because we
are not only a nation, we are a civilisation. We have 5,000 years of history, antiquity, peaks of refinement, assimilation,
diversity … but underlying that diversity, what is not visible to a superficial observer, is great unity. We are not a
parvenu civilisation, we were not born 200 years ago, and therefore it is legitimate for us to see where we are in terms of
our culture today in contrast to the journey we have made and where we have come.
And I believe in the reappropriation of our cultural space without chauvinism or xenophobia. This is all the more important
because we are simultaneously in an aggressive phase of globalisation where the subtext in the field of culture is often co
-option, where the victim is the last to know. And, when the educated are relatively rootless, that co-option becomes all
the more easier. So that, essentially, is the paradigm of the book.
KG: Nothing offers a better platform than a book for a study and discourse of this nature… By the way, some people feel
you have been needlessly uncharitable towards English and Western culture…
PKV: There is hardly any space left for cerebral discourse. There has been an oversimplification of what I have to say in my
book. One is that I am against English. I am not. I am not for the imposition of Hindi. I am just saying that there must be
respect given to our languages and while English is an indispensable language of communication, specially to help us
interface with a globalising world, it cannot be given primacy over the language of our culture.
There is a language of communication and there is a language of culture. The language of culture is a window to your
history, mythology, folklore, proverbs, idioms, to your creativity … and it’s the language in which we cry and laugh.
There is no contradiction between the two. Recent research shows that all those who are well-grounded first in their mother
tongue pick up a foreign language that much faster.
KG: Do you believe English is still a foreign language in India?
PKV: I genuinely believe that while it is a language of communication which has been indigenised in India, it can never take
the place of our natural languages. And, badly spoken English cannot become the lingua franca of a country which is so rich
in its linguistic heritage.
KG: Your book opens with an intense personal experience centred around your father — his attempt to learn English and thus
qualify for the ICS, in which he was successful. Did that influence your career choices? After all, the IFS, in fact the
civil services, are part of the colonial governance construct, it has a hierarchical structure put in place by our colonial
rulers.
PKV: Without a doubt I am a product of the milieu that, in a sense, I was condemned to inherit. That is why I went to St
Columba’s, St Xavier’s and St Stephen’s. And I am not against these schools and colleges. But I have mentioned in my book
that my mother withdrew me from Modern School and put me in St Columba’s because she said the standard of Hindi in Modern
School was too high!
People place priorities because they are products of a milieu. English was the language which was inherited by us, it was
the language of social status and, by that virtue, it was a language of exclusion. If you did not speak English with the
right accent and fluency, however shallow you might be in other respects, or accomplished for that matter, you could never
be part of the charmed circle which ruled India.
So I am a product of that milieu but I am able, at some level I think, and I don’t take any special credit, to see that no
nation can sit on the high table of the world as we aspire without giving respect and pride to their own culture and
languages. So when we try to be like them at the cost of being who we are, that forces India to become a caricature. I have
served all across the world and I have seen this happen.
The whole point is that you have to be an authentic spokesman of your own milieu. Today, I believe that as far as our
general cultural scene goes, Kanchan, mediocrity, mimicry, rootlessness and tokenism have become features which we need to
introspect about. I don’t say this with anger, I say it calmly.
Look at the state of our humanities departments, not an original work! This is the country of Nalanda? Doctoral theses are
being written with footnotes by foreign scholars. Look at the state of our literature, the man who won the Bharatiya
Gnanpeeth told me his books sell less than a thousand copies. Look at the state, pardon my saying so, of even our book
reviews. If you are in the UK, the country that colonised us, on the weekend any broadsheet will have 30 to 40 pages only on
book reviews. Here we have leading newspapers who have dispensed with book reviews!
KG: Look at the state of our classical arts… music, dance…
PKV: Exactly! Look at the state of classical dance… I mean I have been a cultural administrator also. Top exponents of a
parampara which goes back 3,000 years have to telephone friends for days before a performance to fill a hall when the
entrance is free. Look at the state of classical music, the raga represents a 4,000-year-old parampara and it is a very
delicate structure… the elaboration of the mood the gradual vistaar and the drut… Today we have eminent musicians
performing like adolescent pop stars, catering to the lowest common denominator of an audience.
Now, I am not against pop culture. In Hyde Park — I have lived in London — when you have a pop music performance thousands
go for it. But on the same day I have seen people queuing up from 11 in the morning at 20 pounds a pop to attend a
performance of Western classical music. Mature civilisations nurture both. We cannot be reduced to a sterile simplicity that
it is either popular culture or nothing else at all. So these are things we need to think about.
Look at the state of our monuments. Of our museums. Of our libraries. The MGMA gets 30,000 visitors a year. The Louvre gets
2.5 millions at 12 euros an entrance. The Tate gets four million visitors a year at 1.20 pounds an entrance. These
statistics are there in my book. A country like China, in spite of the setback of the cultural revolution, is investing in
100 new museums, 83 are already built. Beijing alone has 150 art galleries. There’s a full gallery district. Here you have a
gallery but no curators, no cataloguing worth the name! So what has happened that our threshold of satisfaction has become
so low?
KG: Maybe it’s the sarkari thing, perhaps we should get the state out of it?
PKV: Hundred per cent. But the state will be out of it when there is a cultural vibrancy in the people. It’s a symbiotic
relationship. The performer will be bad if the audience is unresponsive. Whether at the level of the state or at the level
of the common man or at the level of the artiste and our creative people, there needs to be something that jolts us out of
our complacency. Because, as I said, we are not a parvenu civilisation. We were the benchmark of civilisational excellence,
Kanchan. I was amazed when I read it, 200 years before the birth of Jesus Christ, Bharata wrote the Natyashastra, 6,000
Sanskrit shlokas not on any particular art … a meditation on aesthetics, what constitutes rasa.
Even in popular culture, Bollywood, which we hold as a brand ambassador now of India abroad, I have nothing against it, some
very good films have been made, but 70 per cent of Bollywood is a lift of Hollywood! What has happened to India’s
originality? Music and story? So, there is reason for us to introspect…
KG: We get carried away by foreign awards…
PKV: Yes, any foreign accolade! I give the example, I have nothing against Slumdog Millionaire although on merit I believe
it was mediocre, but when it got the Bafta award, it had not been released in India, people had not seen it. Yet, without
application of mind there was only only euphoria, it made headlines and breaking news everywhere. Similarly with the Booker.
I have read 12 reviews of Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger in the British Press, substantive reviews, some good, some damning,
some panning it. In India, when the award was announced, there was hardly a review. In this great flexible civilisation with
its own refinement touchstone, the only news is that it got the Booker! There has to be santulan, there has to be
equilibrium, which is a sign of maturity…
KG: We are constantly looking at foreign awards…Somebody gets the Sahitya Akademi award or Gnanpeeth does not even find
mention in the media…
PKV: I will give an example, I will name the person. Sitakant Mahapatra, a very sensitive Odiya poet, he gets the Bharatiya
Gnanpeeth award, and his book sells 843 copies! Even till this day in Russia, when a new edition of Pushkin is published, a
million copies sell. And they were selling even during the stage of transition during and after Yeltsin when people had not
got salaries for three months. So you have to think…
KG: You also talk of the mimic men!
PKV: You see mimicry is a natural consequence of rootlessness. People mimic when they are not secure in their own anchorage
and my worry is that for a great deal of the educated in India today there is that rootlessness and therefore that mimicry.
KG: But Nirad C Chaudhuri, about whom you are critical in your appraisal, was equally comfortable with his Indian identity
while living in Britain…
PKV: Without a doubt. But Nirad C Chaudhuri, and this is my own feeling, went out to prove that if you have to be the brown
sahib, you should be the most educated, most accomplished, most knowledgeable, beyond tokenism brown sahib. And he did it in
many respects. His taste of wine, his knowledge of Western culture, his reading his writing… I personally believe that it
was one of those complex consequences of colonialism which produces a man of his towering intellectual stature who judges
himself only in terms of his ability to be the most accomplished Indian in terms of the Western touchstone of refinements.
At another level he remained Bengali at home… But to be harmonious schizophrenics is also a sign of colonial legacy.
KG: You are also harsh with Rammohun Roy…
PKV: I have used Rammohun Roy as an example to show how the well-intentioned leader in the colonial phase needed to
caricature his own civilisation in order to win the approbation of the ruler. First of all, his movement against ills within
his own society and religion, especially sati, was a well-intentioned crusade. But if you read his letter to the Viceroy, he
first devalues his language, the learning of philosophy and metaphysics, and without a doubt they struck the right chord.
And, as you know, when he went to London he actually argued in the House of Commons for the permanent residency in India of
the British and a mixed community through inter-marriage between both. So Rammohun Roy, as I say in my final paragraph,
shows that people are products of their times. Colonialism was a hugely, hugely impacting influence on the lives of our
well-intentioned leaders…
KG: But it did help bring about reforms…
PKV: I give him credit for his crusade against obvious evils, but I analyse how when you are part of the colonial syndrome,
to do that you need to caricature aspects of your civilisation — which is totally unnecessary — to win the approbation of
the ruling power. It’s only an example.
KG: Today we have crossover sahibs who subscribe to the idea of being global citizens, world citizens. For them, the Indian
identity becomes baggage.
PKV: I would say I honestly believe in today’s time, the authentic global citizen is one who has the tools to interface with
a globalising world is one who is rooted in his own milieu, his own civilisation. Because it is only that person who is
rooted in his own milieu who can be a confident interlocutor with the world. Otherwise, we are producing clones. One of the
great myths spawned by globalisation is that having been reduced to a global image we have all become mirror images of each
other. But I believe that differences are real, that diversity needs to be respected and people who are the legatees of such
a civilisation must preserve that identity because only then will they get respect.
— Pavan K Varma’s book, Becoming Indian — The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity has just been published by
Penguin.
http://www.dailypioneer.com/244684/Pavan-K-Varma-in-conversation-with-Kanchan-Gupta.html
Finally, a person who sees Ramohan Roy (and hopefully the Swami Dayananda of the Arya Samaj)for what they were— essentially Hindus who had limited understanding of their own tradition that they internalized the criticism of Hinduism that the British made and instead of finding out if the critcism was justified or deliberate misrepresentation, tried to remake Hinduism in the image of Christianity.
It is to the credit of Hindus that they had better sense than follow these two —although every now and then I do run into the odd Arya Samaji who claims that he doesn’t worship idols or go to the temple. I always tell them, no one worships idols–everyone only worships God. The image or murthi is a means of worship.
कम से कम शांतनॠको कà¥à¤› सीख लेकर देवनागरी को महà¥à¤¤à¥à¤µ देना चाहिà¤
“The image or murthi is a means of woeship”,in the West it is known as creative visualisation
Education in all western countries done in their own languages. Even a tiny country like Estonia chose its own language as national language. Wales, part of great Britain is a bi-lingual state. Welsh language is compulsory in schools. Most citizens of Israel came from Europe or America. They did not choose any European language as their national language. Japan and China are years ahead of India as regards economic prosperity is conserned, they do not have any slavish mentality like India as far as English language is concerned. IF India becomes an economically successful country,many countries will learn national language of India. We are disregarding one of the most rich languages of the world i. e., Sanskrit to maintain the facade of Indian variety of secularism.
Indian Government is opening six more branches of Aligarh Muslim University!
Is India a Hindu majority country?
Shantanu,
“I have used Rammohun Roy as an example to … win the approbation of the ruler.” – The problem is that Roy sought to do what was right in a society that had no understanding of what was right. If contemporary Hindus were willing to listen to him he did not have to go to British, say those things that British would like to hear and then win their support. What would have happened if he did not? Let me also point out that he asked Sati be stopped because Hindu scriptures do not recommend it. He did not. He could have gone to London, like some of our old folks did, and could have said that Hindus were beasts and they needed to be taught civilized values. He did not.
You may like to take a look at Swapan Dasgupta’s mostly-valid criticism:
http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/right-and-wrong/entry/mind-your-language-we-re
Harapriya,
There is a big difference between what Dayananda Saraswati sought to do (maligning the most old traditions) and Roy did (trying to eradicate what was necessary to eradicate). A twenty-first century individual can never judge him properly because one can not imagine how hopelessly dark and depressing had been to fight against the society as well as family (including mother) in eighteenth century Bengal. Give Roy credit for not being today’s Roy (of Maoist fame). He never got enough credit for his courage but I am amused by ungratefulness of the the next generations.
If one asks the India independence created, the anguish felt by Pavan Varma can be explained. The British handed over India as the British administration that it was and remains to this day.
There is therefore no question of the primacy of hindi or its roots as an ancient country that many Indians feels rightly feel is missing. We are then left with mimicry in English art and literature which has defined the India of today.
Reinstating Bharat’s ancient arts can have one of two consequences. It can replace the present stilted and unoriginal mimicry with the time warped ancient arts which have lost all relevance to today’s world or lead to flowering of a new age of confidence and greatness. The latter is unlikely to happen if the country is so lacking in confidence that it can not make the break shackles that binds it to an uncertain course of social and intellectual development.
In recent years it is the English language that has provided the confidence and prosperity for these self-indulgences to be even open up for consideration. In the decades since independence where were the arch lovers of Bharat’s past traditions to entrench it as the pinnacle of achievement? There was no great strength in the study of India’s pasts as there is in England for its ancient history and extinct languages at their great universities. India’s own perfidy has led to the downgrading of Indian studies at Oxbridge.
It is time for India to make the choice to elevate its ancient arts and languages at its great universities. That is the most important thing to be done urgently and now.