Dipankar Gupta: Making Sense of India and Modernity
I first met Dipankar Gupta at the Reset Dialogues on Civilization conference in Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India. We were on the same panel, which was presided by my friend, Harsh Sethi. In his introduction of Gupta, Harsh reminded the audience that the man who was going to take the floor was justly known as a ‘blunt intellectual’. In the past ten years, I have experienced Gupta’s ‘bluntness’ on many occasions, including in the making of this book. In the case of public intellectuals like Dipankar Gupta, bluntness is a virtue and a true test of integrity. There is nothing more pure and beautiful than an intellectual who always speaks truthfully and sincerely. When I suggested Gupta to participate in this book of conversations with me for my series with Oxford University Press, I knew well that he would be at his best as a knowledgeable scholar and a brilliant mind.
Dipankar Gupta, as everybody should know, is a wellknown name in Indian sociology. He is also one of India’s most authoritative public intellectuals. As we can see from these conversations, Gupta’s interests vary from the problem of social stratification and corporate ethics to that of citizenship and
democracy, passing through studies on caste system and ethnic groups in India. However, Gupta is also considered as one of the most acute and insightful theorists of modernity and analysts of modernization in India. His extraordinary array of texts on this subject has helped several generations of Indians to understand the transformation of institutions in India and to perceive the significance of a global world where often the past loses its hold in order to leave the door open to contemporary social changes. In part, this is what Gupta points to when he writes in his book Learning to Forget: The Anti-memoirs of Modernity (2005):
Once we centre our understanding of modernity around the quality of social relations, and not on technological growth, we are better equipped to intervene in social policy such that intersubjectivity can be taken to higher levels . The realization of intersubjectivity can be threatened at every turn by majoritarian rule, despotism, market fundamentalism, and selfish individualism. These are all products of the post-feudal age.
As a social scientist, Gupta believes that modernity is a dynamic phenomenon that creates its own special type of institutions and world views, which are transparent in the works of Karl Marx on the centrality of capitalism in modern times, and that of Max Weber, when he describes modernity as the disenchantment of the world and the end of traditional forms of authority and rationality.
As such, it would be quite right to see Gupta as a scholar who tries to redefine and reconstruct the central concepts of past masters of sociology and philosophy in the Indian context. One could argue that one of the central features of modernity for him is a leap forward to the making of modern citizens. ‘Modernity’, affirms Gupta in Learning to Forget, ‘is not about technology and machines, but, principally, about equality between citizens’. Interestingly, more than ten years later, in his book entitled
From People to Citizen: Democracy’s Must Take Road, Dipankar Gupta adds:
As citizenship grows and develops, so does its cohort, modernity. The greatest damage done to the understanding of modernity is when it is equated with all that is ‘contemporary’. Hence, if there is the Taliban, or ISIS, out there using highly technical instruments of warfare, then that becomes modern; if a dictator encourages science in the direction of mass destruction, then that too is seen as modern. When rich, spoilt people misbehave in public there is a fair amount of tut-tut about how modernity breeds bad manners. All of these are so untrue. If we free modernity from contemporaneity, and see it instead in terms of social relations whose conditions are underwritten by citizenship, then we get a completely different result.
This has all to do with the very notion of ‘iso-ontology’, which Gupta introduces in many of his works, including the very recent one titled Q.E.D.: India Tests Social Theory, where he not only develops once again notions such as modernity, intersubjectivity, and citizenship, but he also defines iso-ontology as what brings ‘an awareness of others’. For Gupta:
A modern society is characterized by intersubjectivity as an ontological condition. This intersubjectivity is not theorized as an intellectual disposition, but emerges from societal compulsions which favour ontological sameness. This ontological isomorphism does not preclude differences, but in all differences there is a presumption of similarity of being. I would like to call this phenomenon iso-ontology and contrast it immediately against poly-ontologies of non-modern societies where status markers were immobile and non-negotiable. In the former case, ontology is the singular, in the latter it is in the plural, and that should tell the whole story.
This transformation that Gupta is referring to is unique to the history of modernity. It is central to the distinction between modern and premodern societies. All his effort, through
his books and research, is to make the distinction between traditional norms and modern values in India clearly visible. This sociological methodology is quite apparent even in some of Gupta’s works that go back to two decades. As a matter of example, we can quote the last page of Mistaken Modernity: To thrust ourselves out of the thralldom of tradition, we are left with no alternative but to resolutely press on with the modernist agenda. Is it at all possible to realistically wprogramme a return to Arcadia, or to willfully reject the many advances of modernity? No matter how often many of us may nostalgically want to return to our ancient and medieval past, we have travelled too far down history and lost too much of our naiveté to actually let that happen. Tradition is no escape route, nor is it wise to fool ourselves into believing that what we are going through today is yet another version of modernity.
Gupta is also very attentive to the philosophical discourse of modernity and he makes the Kantian motto ‘dare to know’ his. In some ways, as a thinker of modernity and public intellectual, he is committed to the watchword of the European Enlightenment, that is, ‘the exit of human beings from their selfincurred immaturity’. This coming out of darkness means, for Gupta, taking responsibility for our understanding, judging, and acting in the public space. Without going into too much detail on this subject, it is indubitable that for Gupta democracy and maturity are both parts of the same reality and, therefore, we cannot have one without the other. Consequently, people who remain in the context of traditional hierarchy and authority are not considered by Gupta as having attained the modern level of mature relations. As he underlines, ‘Once we enter the modern age, these relations between people are universalized such that rules of interaction envelop all social actors…. In a modern society then, one will always trust institutions more than people, for the former embodies relations on a societal scale.’
Gupta: Making Sense of India and Modernity
As such, the immediate impetus for Gupta’s sociology of modernity is the inviolable equality of status as an initial condition for intersubjective relations in the modern society. Furthermore, this equality of status can be granted without prejudice to a public space only if there is emphasis on the making of a democratic culture with the citizens as the main sociological actors. Hence, the context of discussion is very clear for Gupta. For him, both modernity and democracy need to be directed by self-conscious and far-sighted animators of ideas. ‘It is an act of leadership’, he writes, ‘of assiduous application, done with the full knowledge that something new is being crafted. It is dedication of this kind that has brought a “majority”, as we know it, in all established democracies. The direction of democracy, needless to say, should pull us inexorably towards dissolving majority and minority consciousness and proclaiming a simple citizenship instead.’
Gupta, therefore, reminds us repeatedly that ‘democracy is the most demanding and unnatural of all social arrangements’. Naturally, India, as the largest democracy in the world, is well placed to show us that many narratives on tradition and religion have the capacity to endanger the soul and body of democracy. Interestingly, Gupta sees in M.K. Gandhi an integral democrat who developed the culture of citizenship and ethics of democracy in India. ‘Gandhi’, writes Gupta, ‘was, in the ultimate analysis, a democrat and not just an eccentric devoted to mudpacks, pacifism, vegetarianism and celibacy. It is the legacy of citizenship that the Father of the Nation bequeathed to us and for which he paid for with his life.’
Gupta is well conscious of the fact that the importance of Gandhi and his relevance to the present moment of rising religious fanaticism in India and the world could not be greater. Following Gandhi’s spirit of democracy, Gupta hopes
Dipankar
to encourage through his sociology of modernity the process of democratization of Indian democracy, while making no concession to illiberal prejudices and populist passions. As he underlines: ‘When we see ourselves in India today, it is not so much as people but as citizens. From now on, any application of the Constitution makes sense because it addresses all of us as “we, the citizens.”’
I
From Bihar to Delhi
A Bengali Household
RAMIN JAHANBEGLOO (RJ): In your writings you have often emphasized the relation between tradition and modernity. Could we start these conversations by applying this approach to your own life? You were born in October 1949 in Patna, Bihar. How would you describe your family background? Was it traditional or modern?
DIPANKAR GUPTA (DG): Well my background was, I think, a mix of both. I come from a Bengali family, and Bengalis, as you know, are often accused of being cultural patriots. True to type, my father was very keen that we not only speak Bengali at home, but also read and write it. So we were brought up in the traditions prevalent in most Bengali households at that time, except we were rarely in Bengal. But my father’s background was solidly in Bengal, where he was educated and he earned his Masters degree from Calcutta University.
RJ: Were you always out of Bengal?
DG: We were exposed to places outside of Bengal much more. Though I was born in Patna, we never really lived there. My
TalkingSociology. Dipankar Gupta and Ramin Jahanbegloo, Oxford University Press (2019). © Dipankar Gupta and Ramin Jahanbegloo. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199489374.003.0001
father worked for the Reserve Bank of India and I spent my entire pre-adult life travelling around the country to wherever my father was posted. We were always in big cities such as Madras (Chennai), Bombay (Mumbai), Calcutta (Kolkata), Delhi, Kanpur, and so forth, which probably explains why I like metropolises and feel at home in them. So, while I was never steeped in tradition, I was familiar with it from very early in my life.
RJ: Did all this travelling have an impact on you?
DG: Yes, it did. I had to make a new set of school friends every so many years. I also got to know people of different backgrounds. At that time only regional and linguistic markers were significant; not religion, not caste. Sometimes, I do feel that little bit odd when I am with Bengali purists, for I see a lot of good and bad in all cultures, including my own. Yes, there is a lot of Bengali in me, but I am not quite strapped down by it.
RJ: Is that why you were attracted to study more profoundly the two concepts of tradition and modernity?
DG: Well, yes, that could be one part of my answer, but there is a more intellectually grounded awareness of the tradition–modernity relationship, which goes well beyond my family background. Sometime around 1967–8, when I was in my late teens, I was drawn to Marxism, like most young people were those days, and I am happy for that. What impressed me the most in Marx, it may seem quite commonplace now, was his assertion that culture is malleable and contextualized by circumstances outside it. This just blew me away; it was as if a new world had opened up before me. Today this view is so metabolized in our intellectual stream that even an avowed non-Marxist advocates this position, as a matter of course, without knowing its origins. Someone had to make the point, and it was Marx who did it
first. In a way, this was the beginning of sociology, like it or not. Over time, the truth became so obvious and in persistent use that the original proponent was forgotten. This is truly the richest tribute one can pay a scholar. Marxian economics may seem outdated today, primarily because of the way it was practiced and theorized upon after the Soviet Union came into being. Even so, Marx’s writings contain nuggets that still engage even non-Marxists to this day.
Growing Up in an Apolitical Family
RJ: We shall get to that but let us go back for a minute to your life in Patna.
DG: I did not spend much time in Bihar, I was born there because that is where my mother’s family lived. You know how it is when a woman is expecting—she goes to her parents’ home. I think within a few months after I was born, my father set out to Chennai in what was his first posting for the Reserve Bank of India. From there we went to Mumbai, Delhi, and Kanpur. But we would go to Patna for vacations because my mother’s parents and brothers lived there and their household was a very lively one. My father had no siblings; in fact, he was a posthumous child and then there was the Partition, which meant that his relations were scattered everywhere. So our family home, if one can call it that, was in Patna.
RJ: You were born in post-Independent India. Were your parents active in any way in the Independence movement?
DG: No, no, no such involvement. In fact, my parents were very apolitical. My father began his career in a family bank that wound up soon after Partition, which is when he began looking for a regular job and that is how his engagement with the Reserve Bank began. He came from a landed background in
East Bengal, today’s Bangladesh, but all that meant little after the Partition in 1947. Fortunately, unlike many other such families of his kind in those days, my father had a regular degree in economics and banking, so we survived and kept our heads above water. At any rate, before Partition the bank I mentioned sent him to Patna to open its first branch outside Bengal. He was chosen probably because he was near at hand and had the right kind of qualifications for the job. Soon after he came to Patna he got married and within a year or so my older brother was born. To return to your question, no there was no real political engagement in my family, which is just as well.
RJ: Do you find that strange?
DG: Not that strange really. I realize, from my own biography, that most people do not reason out political issues the way members of the active intelligentsia do. Hence, when comments are made along lines of ‘how and what people think’ about politics, or on larger social issues, I am always a bit suspicious. In my view, most people do not have sustained views, or, at least, properly reasoned out one’s on these matters. If I had come from a politically active background, I might have not been as sensitive to the general ideological apathy that exists everywhere. There are mood swings, even periodic flare-ups of passion. Even those views that are of fairly long-standing nature are rarely ever put to critical scrutiny or examined in terms of simple logic. My father’s side of the family leaned heavily towards the judicial service and from my mother’s side they were mostly in the police. So you might say that was quite a mix—judiciary and the arm of the law. So, if anything, my background was more bureaucratic and administrative than anything else; pretty conventional, I should think. My father’s pre-Partition life was neither recalled actively, nor did I see any traces of it while growing up.
RJ: But did they ever talk about Gandhi and Nehru or politics at home?
DG: Very little, very little discussion on politics. In fact, politics was probably first discussed in my family when I was around 19 at the time of Naxalbari and the counterculture movement in Europe. That too would not have happened had I not introduced these topics at home. The Vietnam War, of course, made all of this more immediate. I think that generation suddenly came into politics, even world politics, and mine was not an atypical case. But till that stage, till my undergraduate years, I would listen to political discussions with a certain disdain and particularly resented the raised voices in which they were conducted. I found that both abhorrent and mindless. Little did I know then that very soon I too would be behaving in a similar fashion. Fortunately, I worked my way out of that mode of political participation, but some of that still lingers.
Nehruvian Times and the Partition Effect
RJ: Given that you are a son of the Nehruvian times, how did this factor reflect in your school years or education? Were Gandhi and Nehru your national heroes?
DG: When I was a teenager my parents used to talk about Nehru in fairly laudatory terms. The horrors of the Partition notwithstanding, I did not detect any animosity in my family against the political establishment of the day. Fortunately, no Partition fixation; that can be irritating and repetitive. While Nehru was a hero, no doubt, there were ambiguities and contradictions in the way my parents looked at him and I became conscious of those much later. On occasions, in spite of the adulation that Nehru and Gandhi received in my home, my parents also saw them as usurpers of sorts. Deep
down they felt that Subhas Chandra Bose deserved to be the leader of the Congress. Then there would be occasional, very occasional, ruminations of what Subhas would have done had he been given the chance. There was no mention of Bose mingling with fascists in Germany and Japan. So, the memory was very selective—good ones, yes, uncomfortable ones, out; very little was based on history, but more on nostalgia and wishful thinking.
RJ: Where did Nehru stand in your childhood days?
DG: Nehru was admired for his education, his presence, his vision, and, most of all, because he had a well worked-out plan to take India forward. My parents felt that there would be a future for us white-collared class for Nehru would rapidly change India into a land of doctors and engineers. Nehru’s autobiography, Towards Freedom, was something my father admired a lot, especially its literary style. I also learnt a few difficult English words, such as ‘valetudinarian’, from that book.
RJ: As a family which suffered during the Partition, were there any effects of that violence in your home?
DG: Discussions on Hindu-Muslim relations did not figure very much in my home. Partition had happened, but now it is over. Perhaps because my grandparents, both maternal and paternal, were quite successful in their respective professions, and hence not that unsettled by the Partition, that political discussions were quite rare in my family. Nor did the Muslims we knew, and there were several, seen as very different from the rest in the social circle. In my grandparents’ home in Patna, I remember the admiration with which my maternal family held a very senior Muslim police officer. Their ways, their tastes, their looks were often discussed in a near-envious fashion. At that time, none of this seemed unusual or self consciously secular.
It is not as if we were more enlightened then but perhaps because Nehru’s Congress had the most workable dream and agenda for the future that the Partition did not matter that much. For a family that saw its future as officers in the Indian Administrative Services (IAS) or the police, or as doctors and engineers, Nehru’s appeal was compelling and it is this promise that spoke directly to our ambitions.
RJ: Did it stay that way for long?
DG: My own sense is that around the time I was about 19 or 20 years old we could tell that this dream was not quite happening. Which is probably why, during the late 1960s, Maoism gripped a number of young people from professional and bureaucratic backgrounds. Nehru’s charisma was by then on the wane and this was directly on account of the way he conducted the India–China war. After all these years of being held up in the highest esteem to be remembered by the China fiasco, in the declining years of one’s life, was quite tragic. Those who had not known Nehru earlier but had met him for the first time post the China war were not impressed by him. He was not the attractive, charismatic man they had imagined him to be. But, even so, we still believed that it was Nehru’s India that governed us and only a few made out the difference between him and his daughter, Indira. Now all this is very clear, but not so then.
RJ: Were your parents religious?
DG: They were religious, in a manner of speaking. My father used to chant a few slokas to Shiva every morning, and my mother and grandmother had a puja room in the house where every Tuesday and Thursday they spent about half an hour praying with incense burning and freshly made sweet prasad—offerings to the Gods. It was this prasad
that attracted us the most and we all got generous helpings of it—including our friends and our dog—who probably demanded and received the most. After my father retired, this puja room disappeared in his new home, and so did the prasad. Temple visits were rare other than when on a sightseeing tour and I never quite enjoyed this part for reasons I cannot explain. In my view, my family was culturally Hindu, but not very ritualistic. Durga Puja, however, was a major event, from buying new clothes to going to the marquee where Durga was worshipped, to the food that was served, and the theatre and entertainment that followed. It was a lot of fun. I do not think that the attraction of Durga Puja can be understood in pure religious terms—these other cultural factors must be worked in as well.
An Agnostic Indian
RJ: Did you have any contact with religions of India as a child?
DG: Not really. As I said, our religious observances were not of the temple-visiting variety. They were limited principally to Durga Puja or Kali Puja. Of the two, Durga Puja generated the most enthusiasm. The main reason for this was that it lasted for ten fun-filled days where we could all preen ourselves in our brand new outfits and in our new shoes that still pinched. Once, when I was probably eight years old, or about that age, my parents took us to Mathura and Vrindavan. All I recall is a feeling of discomfort as I could not relate to those places, as one should, or was expected to.
RJ: Do you consider yourself an atheist?
DG: I do not think I am an atheist.
RJ: How about being an agnostic?
DG: I am more of an agnostic. I think an atheist would have to be kind of blind and dogmatic. Who can ever be certain about the beginning of the beginning or of the end of the end?
RJ: Later, you came back to religion, not in a spiritual way, but let us say, from a sociological point of view.
DG: Yes, I did but that was because of Marxism and also on account Emile Durkheim, who, incidentally, was no Marxist at all. It is their sociology that attracted me and while people saw differences between the two, which were real, I was drawn by the similarities between them. In both cases, religion was not examined in theological terms but within the framework of society and of forces that moulded it, even made it. For Durkheim, religion captures a euphoria that emerges from participating as a member of a collective and hence had very mundane reasons for its origins. It was in this sense that I found a similarity between Durkheim and Marx. Marx’s famous line which said ‘religion is the opium of the people’ is quite similar to Durkheim’s view in that religion keeps our spirits up because the coming together as a collective makes us feel larger than what our puny selves are in everyday life. The reason why we tend to see Durkheim in anti-Marxian terms is because the phrase ‘religion is the opium of the people’ is read divorced from the sentence of which it is a fragment. That same sentence says that religion is also the ‘sigh of the oppressed people’ and ‘soul of a soulless condition’. It is ‘opium’ only in so much as it helps to take the pain away from our insecurities. It’s not an ‘opium’ as if it puts us to sleep and, perhaps, to dream.
RJ: How else did the views of Marx and Durkheim on religion impact you?
DG: Once I was convinced that religion was not a free-floating phenomenon that had an independent existence in our mental
space, I was keen to expose the hollowness of the view that Indians were innately religious and driven primarily by the grammar of Hinduism. I found many sociological texts that kept suggesting that we Indians are determinedly ‘other-worldly’ and ‘hierarchical’ and ‘fatalistic’, often at the same time. I believe this point of view to be plain ridiculous. Marxism showed me a way out of this, which when coupled with the anti-establishmentarianism spirit of the 1960s and 1970s was hard to beat. In addition, there was also the ugliness of poverty the moment you stepped outdoors. Marxism was also a reaction to this ugliness. In this context, I need also add, that it was the ugliness of communism in practice that drove many people to anti-Marxism in East Europe and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). In other words, context is of the essence.
The Art of Being a Bengali
RJ: Back to your family life: how important was the cultivation of ‘culture’ in your home?
DG: As you can imagine in a Bengali household there was a self-conscious assertion of Rabindranath Tagore at practically every step. There was always something out of Tagore that explained, or gave meaning to, almost every event that happened around us. It is somewhat like the way a British person might quote Shakespeare or the Bible. The quote from Tagore that I like best is: ‘Satan enters your home only when there is a flaw within it.’ Bankim Chandra was not quite at the same level as Tagore, though I was introduced to his Krishna Kanta’s Will in my early teens by my father. Yes, we grew up with sayings of Tagore and Vivekananda. This often led to some disagreements between my mother and I because I kept telling her that both her heroes were very experimental with God and, indeed, with the idea of Hinduism itself. But
that happened after I joined college, not before that. Till I was about 16 or so, I was innocent about these issues. Doubtless, you know many people who were much more intellectually alert than I was at that age.
RJ: How deeply immersed are you in Bengali tradition? Were there other influences?
DG: My Bengaliness is neither fully rounded nor profound, as I mentioned earlier. It was largely family influence, though a very powerful one. A close friend of mine once said that I ‘feel’ like a Bengali but think like a non-Bengali. I am not sure what that means, but I can sense there is some truth lurking in that observation. As we entered our teens, western pop took over our aesthetic sense of music and my father, in particular, despaired at that. Not that he stopped us from listening to Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, or The Beatles, but often enquired, with true puzzlement, as to how we could take all that noise to be music? Even so, Tagore songs and poems did the rounds in our home, and even now I can recite a few lines, hum a few songs by the great poet, and pass off as a reasonably cultivated Bengali. When I put on that garb, I think I try to be like my father, but of course, my appreciation of this aspect of culture is quite shallow, though not completely untutored. I can spot a Bengali charlatan when I see one.
RJ: The atmosphere in your home was very Bengali, even though you lived mostly out of Bengal.
DG: Yes, you could say that. I do not know how people from other regions who live outside their original home state cope with their cultural baggage, but I grew up in a fairly Bengali atmosphere. A lot of Tagore was always swirling around us and we almost worshipped him. There was just nothing lacking in that man, and that is indeed how most Bengalis viewed him; he
was a ‘nikhut’ (blemish-free) individual. There was also a fair amount of adoration for Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, but here there was also something that was somewhat instrumental. The message between the lines was that if Vidyasagar could rise to such eminence in spite of being so poor, we should not fiddle with the advantages we were born with. This was meant to exhort us to be more diligent with our studies and not slag off, as we tended to do from time to time. I am sure this is the way it was in most Bengali families, so obsessed were we with school results and rank.
RJ: Were there any other figures from Bengal who figured prominently in your childhood? What about religious leaders like Vivekananda?
DG: Vivekananda was also a fairly constant reminder of our Bengaliness. Even though he was much larger than just Bengal, Bengalis appropriated him as their own. Almost every Bengali, me included, know several passages from his 1893 speech to the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago. On the political plane, as I mentioned, there was the romance of Subhas Bose, though he was way behind in importance after Tagore and Vivekananda. My grandmother was deep into Radha–Krishna stories, and I wonder if she got them from Chandidas. Her recalling of tales of Ram, Sita, and the rest of the cast were pretty standard. Did she read all that in Krittibasi Ramayan, as most did in Bengal or not, I do not really know. At that point in my life I had no idea about these things or the fact that every myth had so many renditions.
RJ: But isn’t there a very strong religious element in Vivekananda?
DG: Yes, yes, his Hinduism was very pronounced, but there was a modern side to him too. For example, I remember my mother telling me very often that Vivekananda questioned Ramakrishna
very closely, and for long, before he finally accepted Goddess Kali. I suspect that this story did more to still the budding atheistic sentiments in me, rather than encourage radical thinking. I suppose her logic was that I should not question these issues because all of that had already been done for us by Vivekananda and religion had passed the test. This is where faith steps in and reasoning takes the back seat. There are parts of Vivekananda that I find very religious, in a worshipful kind of way, and that didn’t move me. He is probably one of the first men who said Hinduism was intrinsically tolerant which is now a very commonly used phrase in all kinds of popular and intellectual discourses. At the same time, he believed that Vedanta needed Islam for its practical demonstration. He prized the principle of equality in Islam a great deal. He found much to be admired in Christianity too, but I remember he was rather harsh on missionaries who believed that the only true God was the Christian one. Nor can I deny the impact he made on me when he denounced the caste system in a language that would make any modern iconoclast proud.
RJ: Do you see Tagore in a similar way?
DG: Tagore is another matter. His sophistication is at a different level, on a very elevated plane. He is dear to most Bengalis, and I too am a great admirer of his works, particularly his views on humanism, aesthetics, religion, and politics; though much of this is not equally known to many of his Bengali followers. I became aware of them later in my twenties and was tremendously overwhelmed by the perspicacity and insight with which he propounded these issues. For example, Tagore’s Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) can be read as a work in which an ambitious wife, bored by a very regular life and husband, seeks out a new diversion with a wandering politician. But it could be read in terms of a great debate between nationalism and humanism. Charulata, a film made by Satyajit Ray based on Tagore’s novel
Nastanirh (broken nest) too brings to the fore the issue of marital fidelity and exposes the pretensions of our everyday lives. At a time when nationalism circled in swift currents in India, for someone like Tagore to oppose nationalism, four square, was an intellectual tour de force. This is a lesson that should resonate with us even today. This is because nationalism can be a destructive force too. Likewise, in Gora Tagore encourages us to ask whether or not our epistemological understanding of the ‘self’ and the world is pure intellect, or culture at work, or governed by circumstances and context. If we opt for the latter then we would quickly realize how our religious, or cultural identity is not hallowed by tradition but hollowed by time, and only the here and the now of the context breathes fire into it. Tagore, for me, is very relevant in contemporary India and I do not say this as a Bengali but as someone who is persuaded by the sociological imagination.
An Unhappy School Boy
RJ: Let’s go back to your schooling, which you were saying was partly in Chennai and partly in Mumbai.
DG: Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai, and Kanpur. In the first 16 years of my life, I spent a considerable number of years in all these places. All the schools I went to were run by one Christian denomination or the other. We never paid any attention to that for my father was only interested in the school’s academic reputation when he sought admissions for us. Yet, in those schools, we were never herded into Christianity–never went to Mass, never went to Church–as part of the school curriculum. No doubt, our school teachers wanted to make us gentlemen, not ‘chokra boys’, but were quite content to leave us as Hindus. I later learnt from my Christian friends that there was much greater pressure on them to conform by the school authorities,
