The Vitality of India - Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture

THE VITALITY OF INDIA 

The Vitality of India 

INDRA NATH CHOUDHURI 

The disintegration of the Soviet Union 

and end of the Cold War and also the 

achievement of the self-sustaining 

growth under private ownership and partial 

rejection of the Marxian ideology by the 

People’s Republic of China have made any 

discussion on ideologies or acceptance of any 

of them for the development of a country 

irrelevant. On the other side, one can see the 

urge of different nation-states to search for, 

and to discover and apply their vitality, pràna 

shakti or the inner strength rooted in their 

culture as a practical philosophy for their 

growth and development. 

The sweeping tide of globalization in the 

postmodernist period has also led people to 

search for their identities and roots and also 

their ethnicity to ward off the co-opting, 

homogenizing or appropriating tendencies of 

the global market. All these, such as assertion 

of a separate identity, are possible only by 

rediscovering the vitality of a nation. Asserting 

separate identity does not mean breeding 

fascism or showing totalitarian tendencies or 

exclusiveness. It only means that if one 

knows oneself, one’s own identities, one’s 

kendra, then it becomes easy for one to harmoniously 

blend together the various strands 

of thoughts of a multiracial, multireligious, 

multicultural and multilingual country like 

India. Assertion of one’s identity in a monocultural 

state can be problematic as one can 

see that in monocultural states in Europe and 

America where after the 9/11 destruction of 

the twin towers in New York every Muslim 

has become a suspect and where the goals are 

now set on the principle of an eye for an eye 

and, in the process, great harm and destruction 

have taken place in today’s world to the 

human lives and cultures of various nations. 

In a state like India, affirmation of one’s identity, 

in fact, helps in creating a landscape of 

harmony, of democracy and freedom and of 

tolerance, solidarity and dialogue because 

India’s great diversity, its pluralistic 

worldview and its multicultural and 

multireligious reality form the basis of 

India’s identity. A search for India’s identity 

is, in fact, a search for Indianness or, in other 

words, a search for its vitality and as a consequence 

the issue of the vitality of India turns 

into a search for all those dimensions which 

together constitute and define the vitality or 

the inner strength of India to be found in its 

ancient civilization, universal ethical values, 

pluralistic traditions, in its stable democracy 

and in the message of satya and ahimsà by 

Gandhi and in the unification of tradition 

with modernity by Tagore and in the adoption 

of internationalism by Nehru. 

Culture, philosophy and spiritualism 

The vitality though largely inward-bound 

had multifaceted expressions which looked at 

life in its totality—the material, the supramental 

and the spiritual and hence one can 

find India’s vitality rooted in its culture, 

philosophy and spiritualism. 

Others may locate India’s vitality in its 

plurality and diversity operating in an ambience 

of inclusiveness. 

Democracy and the common man 

Then there are many others who uncover 

India’s vitality in the vibrancy of its democracy 

where the wisdom of the common man 

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in making the correct political choice is well 

known and at the same time so much admired 

and applauded. 

Can I draw your kind attention to the 

sacred images of Sri Ramakrishna 

Paramahamsa and Swami Vivekananda 

which we all have so solemnly stored in the 

inner sanctum of our minds. In the images Sri 

Ramakrishna is always found to be wearing 

the dress of the common man and looking so 

humble but at the same time spiritually so 

much enlightened and Swamiji is always seen 

wearing the saffron robe and looking so dynamic 

and full of sanctified brightness. But 

the luminous dynamism of the ochre-dressed 

Swami Vivekananda flows from the enlightened 

but the commonly looking and also 

commonly dressed Sri Ramakrishna 

Paramahamsa. After all the common man or 

loka is a very powerful institution of India. 

The word for folk in India is loka. The root 

meaning of loka is to see. In fact loka means 

to see and which is seen. It also means man, 

the common man or folk and their behaviour 

which is always value-oriented acceptable 

behaviour and is complementary to shàstra, 

the prescriptive aspect of culture. Loka always 

emits àloka or luminosity and therefore 

man is accepted as the centre of all activities 

so much so that the Mahàbhàrata says, there 

is no one bigger than man. In this context one 

can very easily understand the value of 

communitarian polity and the electoral democracy 

which is one of India’s greatest political 

achievements and affirmation of human 

political movement. This sense of communality 

and, at the same time, giving importance 

to the individual is as old as the Indian 

civilization and is the force unifying the Indian 

people and their activities—social, religious, 

political and intellectual. 

In this context, one can realize why 

Macaulay in his speech in British Parliament 

in 1835, commonly referred to as the 

‘minutes’, observed that during his travel 

across the length and breadth of India he had 

not seen one person who was a beggar, who 

was a thief. Such wealth he had seen in this 

country, such high moral values, people of 

such calibre, that he did not think that Britain 

would ever conquer this country, unless 

it broke the very backbone of this nation, 

which was her spiritual and cultural heritage. 

Therefore, he proposed that Britain should 

replace India’s ancient education system, her 

culture, for if the Indians thought that all that 

was foreign was good and greater than their 

own, they would lose their self-esteem, their 

native self-culture and they would become 

what we wanted them to be, a truly dominated 

nation. 

As a result, the British rule attacked the 

core of the country, which was spread all over 

the place among the people of the village 

society, to infuse a different voice, a different 

culture and a different political structure. In 

village after village, where social swaraj existed, 

government rule ultimately controlled 

it. In fact, not only the moral, the metaphysical 

position and power position do not 

equate, they rarely coincide and hence it was 

a great setback for the people of this country. 

After independence, the re-introduction of 

the idea of Panchayati Raj or local self-government 

has now become quite popular and, 

as a result, the dominant model of centralized, 

parliamentary democracy has been appropriately 

modified and a distinctly Indian 

variety of democracy has emerged heralding 

the politics of the poor, the loka, in whom 

resides the vitality of India. Instead of the 

westernized middle-class intelligentsia, 

Mahatma Gandhi took the side of those 

who were on the periphery—the peasants, 

the poor, the common man—and searched 

for India’s vitality in them. Swami 

Vivekananda says in his ‘Memoirs of European 

Travel’: ‘These common people have 


August


suffered oppression for thousands of years— 

suffered it without murmur, and as a result 

have got wonderful fortitude. They have suffered 

eternal misery, which has given them 

unflinching vitality. Living on a handful of 

grain, they can convulse the world; give them 

only half a piece of bread, and the whole 

world will not be big enough to contain their 

energy. . . . And, besides, they have got the 

wonderful strength that comes of a pure and 

moral life, which is not to be found anywhere 

else in the world. Such peacefulness, such 

contentment, such love, such power of silent 

and incessant work, and such manifestation 

of lion’s strength in times of action—where 

else will you find these!’ 

Tradition and modernity 

There are many others who think that 

India can ensure its vitality by blending the 

tradition and modernity in a conscious manner. 

It has to chart out its own map of 

progress and prosperity. Economy is the basic 

recipe for solution of its problems, but it 

need not follow blindly the Western model of 

development. The Western model of development 

ignores the premise of thought held 

valid in India, or other Third World countries. 

For example, the multiplicity of languages, 

religions and races is regarded as leading to 

fragmentation from the Western point of 

view, but it is, in fact, giving importance to 

every part of the whole, and putting a stop to 

the elimination of human beings as persons. 

Any monolithic structure can bring about a 

fragmentation of life, of man and of knowledge, 

undermining the unity of life. Any attempt, 

for example, to discuss the growth of 

Indian literature in terms of Sanskritized 

màrga (tradition) smacks of cultural blindness. 

One just cannot ignore the impact of 

regional languages on each other and also 

oral literature of India for they are important 

in their literary and historical perspectives. 

An example of folk India 

Indian writers live in a universe of wonder 

and adoration where modernity is so 

thoughtfully interwoven in a texture so well 

created by the folk and tribal traditions of 

India. This vitality makes the culture 

extremely rich and everexpanding. I give an 

example of a story of great magnitude from 

the Indian oral tradition related to A. K. 

Ramanujan by a half-blind Kannada woman. 

The story resembles the episode of Greek 

King Oedipus by Aeschylus, but no one can 

dare say that the village woman of the socalled 

‘little’ tradition borrowed it from the 

so-called ‘great’ tradition of the Greek 

drama. The story is: 

‘A girl is born with a curse on her head 

that she would marry her own son and beget a 

son by him. As soon as she hears of the curse, 

she vows she would try to escape it. She 

secludes herself in a dense forest eating only 

fruit, forswearing all male company. But 

when she attains puberty, as fate would have 

it, she eats a mango from a tree under which a 

passing king has urinated. The mango impregnates 

her. Bewildered, she gives birth to 

a male child. She wraps him up in a piece of 

her sari and throws him in a nearby stream. 

The child is picked up by the king of the next 

kingdom and he grows up to be a handsome 

young adventurous prince. He comes for 

hunting in the same forest and the cursed 

woman falls in love with the stranger, telling 

herself that she is in no danger as she has no 

son alive. She married him and bears him a 

child. According to custom, the father’s 

swaddling clothes are preserved and brought 

out for the new born. The woman recognizes 

at once the piece of sari with which she had 

swaddled her first son, now her husband, and 

understands that her fate has really caught up 

with her. She waits till everyone is asleep and 

sings a lullaby to her new-born baby: 


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Sleep 

O son 

O grandson 

O brother to my husband 

Sleep, O Sleep 

Sleep well 

Then she hangs herself by the rafter with 

her sari twisted into a rope’. 

Sometimes folk-tales can elucidate 

the truth far more convincingly than carefully 

worded theories of the so-called ‘great 

tradition’. 

The most remarkable thing about India is 

that, in spite of the variety of races and languages 

and literature, both classical and oral, 

it has such powerful and persistent common 

traits that in spite of the political and administrative 

vicissitudes and disunity and fragmentation 

which India has suffered, its cultural 

unity has remained intact through thousands 

of years of her history. Any model of development 

ignoring the cultural component of our 

multilingual, multiracial, multireligious and 

multicultural existence can lead to anomie, 

rootlessness and alienation. 

Argumentative tradition 

There are others like Amartya Sen and 

Amiya Kumar Bagchi who tend to locate 

India’s vitality in the argumentative tradition. 

One can trace the argumentative tradition 

from the length of the Mahàbhàrata and the 

Ràmàyana to Jain scholars’ conversation 

with Alexander to Ashoka and Akbar’s religious 

discourses. While ascertaining the 

argumentative legacy of India, Amartya Sen 

emphasizes its continuing contemporary 

relevance and says that it is not the only reasonable 

way to view history, culture and politics 

in India, but at the same time, because 

of its contemporary relevance, the acceptance 

of heterodoxy and dialogues has proved to 

be fruitful for secularism and democracy 

in India. Contestatory public argument, 

according to Professor Sen, is the essence of 

the freedom of expression in a properly functioning 

democracy. Amiya Kumar Bagchi endorses 

this view and says that India’s vitality 

is the argumentative, agitating, freedom-loving 

democratic people of India. 

All these multifaceted dimensions are interrelated 

with each other and provide an exciting 

base for an assessment of the ‘Vitality 

of India’. 

Vedanta, the vital force 

The truth is that there is a relativity in 

perception, and this relativity is a durable 

thing conditioned by long historical furnishing 

of the mind and, hence, when we talk 

about the vitality of India, the whole discussion 

tends to take a supermundane form because 

the history of India for the last thousands 

of years has been a history of spirituality 

where one after another religions were 

born. It is really the marked feature of the 

Indian mind that it seeks to attach a spiritual 

meaning to everything and, hence, hierarchically 

puts his true spiritual self over the nation. 

This dominant idea India has never quite 

forgotten even under the stress of the externalities 

of political and social construction. It 

is in this context that the Vedanta is accepted 

by many as the vital force of India. Through 

the knowledge of Vedanta one realizes that 

the real source of one’s energy and strength 

lies within oneself which is at the same time 

one with the Supreme Reality. 

Vedanta tells about the all-pervasive 

Brahman. In the Ishà Upanishad, it says, 

‘Ishà vàsyam idam sarvam yat kim ca 

jagatyàm jagat’ (‘All this—whatsoever 

moves on the earth—should be covered by 

the Lord, by one’s own Self’). It also says 

‘Ishvarah sarvabhutànam hrid-desherjuna 

tishthati’ (‘The Lord, O Arjuna resides in the 

region of the heart of all creatures’). It also 

tells about yoga, the way of union with the 


August


Divine or the art of the spiritual life and the 

concept of human race as members of a family 

(Vasudhaiva kutumvakam). It also 

preaches the idea that all religions are essentially 

different paths to the same goal (‘Ekam 

sat vipràh vahudhà vadanti’) and the concept 

that we must work for the welfare of society 

as a whole and not only for ourselves 

(Vahujana hitàya vahujana sukhàya). The 

six-point formula of Vedanta reveals the innate 

Divinity of man. Vedanta views the life 

of man in its wholeness. Its theme is Man, as 

says Swami Ranganathananda, ‘Man in 

search of fullness of truth, beauty, and goodness.’ 

Part of this search is in the external 

world, the social welfare of the people, and 

rest of the search lies in the internal world, 

where he seeks spiritual freedom. All these 

when taken together provide us with a comprehensive 

worldview so much so that in 

1952, Arnold Toynbee, the celebrated historian, 

observed that in 50 years, the world 

would be under the hegemony of the United 

States, but in the 21st century, as religion 

captures the place of technology, it is possible 

that India, the conquered, will conquer 

its conquerors. What Toynbee meant by India 

conquering her conquerors was that her 

civilizational and cultural values would 

dominate the world, particularly the Western 

world, in the 21st Century. It is no wonder 

hence that India received such deserving epithets 

like ‘speaking tree’ from Lannoy in 

1971, ‘emerging power’ from Cohen, 2001, 

and ‘unbounded India’ from Guru Charan 

Das in 2002. 

It is a different story that the observation 

of Toynbee has not come all that true 

but I shall come back to it a little later. 

What I want to impress upon is that Vedanta 

no doubt provides the insights which can be 

of crucial value to withstand the challenges 

human beings are facing today and that 

it also can provide the framework of a 

philosophy to sustain the emerging global 

consciousness. It has given power to our 

minds and if the special attribute of Germany 

is its organization, of the US its enterprise, 

of Japan adaptability and of Great 

Britain its balance, then the hallmark of Indians 

has been the power of its mind sustained 

by its philosophy of Vedanta. William 

Rees-Mogg sees the continuity of 

India’s spiritual traditions as its greatest 

strength while predicting for it the status of 

an economic superpower in the 21st century. 

There is a possibility that in the wake of 

emerging challenges, India can always fall 

back on its spiritual tradition, on its cultural 

ethos to effectively face these challenges and 

neutralize them. 

Environmental crisis 

One of the serious challenges mankind is 

facing today is environmental pollution. In the 

name of progress for the welfare state modern 

scientific-technological civilization is slowly 

destroying the ecology. Modern man does not 

regard the natural world as alive in the same 

sense that man himself is alive. He does not 

think that man and nature are mutually related 

and part of a greater life entity. The environmental 

pollution has shattered the illusion that 

by taming the elements and forces of nature, 

happiness and peace can be attained. Man’s 

severance of nature is revealed by the Hindi 

poet Ajneya when he says, ‘Bird/there is no 

bird since then, I also do not exist, I’. It tallies 

with a revealing mini conversation from 

Beckett’s ‘End Game’ between Hamm and 

Clove. Hamm: ‘Nature has forgotten us.’ 

Clove: ‘There is no more nature.’ 

As Ian Mectarg has shown, the whole of 

the Western world is riddled with a basic 

fallacy—man has forgotten that he must work 

with nature, not against her. Eager and able to 

use nature, we have successfully ‘neutralized’ 

her, or as others have said, ‘disenchanted’ her. 


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Nature is no longer she but it, a faithful 

distinction. Violation of mother Prakriti is a 

part of the dictionary of present pathology. 

The peculiar situation in India is that the Western 

model of development provides us with 

the means to destroy our natural resources 

rapidly; and tragically our under development 

furnishes us with the reasons, the excuses, and 

the compulsions to do so, and in the process, 

we face unmitigated disaster from both directions—poverty 

from below, and development 

from above. Now we are surrounded with an 

alien and deadly nature, which undoes man’s 

best hopes and visions. Now in this city, says 

another Hindi poet Muktibodh, ‘there is no 

sun or moon/in the mist of conspiracy there 

are shadows of ghost/under the slipper of 

Gandhi army boots are reverberating/the selfish 

baboons are sitting on the turret of the fort/ 

the roads are dark/and one can only listen to 

the poisonous whispers’. 

The Indian worldview does not allow a 

dichotomy between matter and spirit, man 

and nature. But during the post-Renaissance 

and post-19th century Industrial Revolution 

period, Descartes, on the one hand, and 

Newtonian mechanistic science on the other, 

established a dichotomy between matter and 

spirit. One should always remember that 

there is only one path to survival and that 

path is the ecological one, of harmony 

between man and nature, of sustainability, 

diversity and balance as opposed to domination, 

exploitation and surplus. The moment 

you say that matter and spirit are in a 

relationship of mutability, then transsubstantiation 

balance becomes the keyword 

in any aspect of life. 

Religious fundamentalism 

The other challenge which India is facing 

is religious fundamentalism leading to communalism 

which is eating into the very fabric 

of our concept of composite culture and 

pluralistic worldview. What can destroy India 

is a change in the spirit of its people away 

from pluralism and coexistence that have 

been our greatest strength. The acceptance of 

plurality is possible in the country because of 

our understanding of dharma as a socioethical 

category. It is like a centripetal force 

in nature which holds and sustains and keeps 

things at the centre. The spirit of dharma is 

love for everybody. 

The answer to communalism lies not in 

abolishing religion but a proper understanding 

of dharma as a unifying pluralistic force. 

One needs to be a critical insider like 

Shankara, Gautama Buddha, Muslim Sufis, 

Nanak Dev, Vivekananda or Mahatma 

Gandhi to point out the wrongs within the 

traditions and then suggest ways to change 

them from inside. Gandhiji realized the vitality 

of the culture-bound concept of dharma 

to communicate with the masses of the country. 

The social scientist, T. N. Madan, has 

argued that the increasing secularization of 

modern Indian life is paradoxically responsible 

for the rise of fundamentalism, since ‘it 

is the marginalization of faith, which is what 

secularism is, that permits the perversion of 

religion. There are no fundamentalists or revivalists 

in traditional society.’ The implication 

is that secularism has deprived Indians 

of their moral underpinnings—the meaning 

that faith gives to life—and fundamentalism, 

both Hindu and Muslim, has risen as an almost 

inevitable Hegelian antithesis to the 

secular project. The only way out of this dilemma 

is for Hindus to return to dharma—to 

the tolerant, holistic, just, pluralist Hinduism 

articulated so effectively by Swami 

Vivekananda. To discriminate against another, 

to attack another, to kill another, to 

destroy another’s place of worship on the basis 

of his faith is not part of our dharma, as it 

was not part of Swami Vivekananda’s 

dharma. Says Swami Vivekananda: 


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No one form of religion will do for all. Each 

is a pearl on a string. We must be particular 

above all else to find individuality in each. 

No man is born to any religion; he has a 

religion in his own soul. Any system which 

seeks to destroy individuality is in the long 

run disastrous. . . . The end and aim of all 

religions is to realise God. The greatest of all 

training is to worship God alone. If each man 

chose his own ideal and stuck to it, all religious 

controversy would vanish. 

It is time to go back to these fundamentals 

of Hinduism. It is time to take Hinduism 

back from the fundamentalists. It is also time 

to tell Islamic fundamentalists about the true 

nature of Islam. Dr APJ Abdul Kalam refers 

to a saying from Koran in his Ignited Minds 

that ‘All God’s creatures are His family; and 

he is the most beloved of God who tries to do 

most good to God’s creatures.’ 

Socio-cultural discrimination 

Another challenge which India is facing 

is that of suppression of the lower caste and 

violation of democratic rights of the rural 

poor, adivasis and dalits. One can hear innumerable 

stories of atrocities and violence 

against the weaker sections of the society. 

This challenge can be met by properly understanding 

the cultural ethos of India connected 

with the Vedic concept rita and satya. Satya 

is the sustaining Truth and rita is the dynamic 

regular order or the Truth of becoming. To 

sustain the social and moral order or rita, the 

society was divided into four classes. The 

literary documents provide ample evidence to 

testify that in the beginning this class system, 

now changed into a caste system, was 

actually a functional division of society 

being based on the particular potentialities 

and tastes of the different members. In fact, 

the word varna means what is chosen. A 

student is called a varnim because he has 

chosen a profession for which he is preparing 

himself. This whole division of labour is 

metaphorically personified as body of a man 

whose limbs are interconnected and the absence 

of any one can cripple him. Indian culture 

gives us four varnas and not castes with 

a proviso for upward and downward mobility 

based on meritorious deeds or otherwise. Today 

one may feel that these are old ideas, but 

those Indian ideas which are modern, exudes 

a spirit of Indianness and thereby hints at the 

deep sense of continuity in the midst of 

change. Indian culture demands the common 

people’s independence from every form of 

ascendancy over them. 

Violence 

Violence is the most important and serious 

challenge everybody in the society is facing 

today. The central point of violence is 

complete disregard for man’s life and his 

body. In the present time three factors related 

to body have created a crisis in the traditional, 

religious and philosophical understanding of 

human life: 

i) License to mutilate and demolish a 

body in the name of religion, political ideology 

and what people say, right to death. 

ii) Body is used to increase the hunger 

for sexuality. 

iii) Body in relation to fashion results in 

the sexualization of the body isolated from 

the previous system of boundaries and controls. 

It deconstructs the body with the main 

purpose of selling a product and thereby 

breaking the order of symbolism and makes it 

subservient to a technology. 

In Indian tradition, Paramàtmà, who is 

essentially pure spirit, chit, and who manifests 

Himself as cosmic Purusha, resides in 

every individual body with His whole nature, 

akhanda bhàvanà, and hence there is no reason 

why the body which is the abode of the 

Supreme should not be saved from destruction. 

Metaphors of the house and the householder, 

the castle or city and the king, the 


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chariot and the rider, the cage and the bird, 

the sheet (chàdar) and the weaver, the 

chunari (scarf) and the bride, etc. are very 

much alive both in the written and oral traditions 

today symbolizing the unity of the body 

and the Supreme Soul. Perhaps the most significant 

way in which tradition can contain 

violence is the displacement of the patterns of 

violence by introducing the time-tested universal 

laws of ethicality, love and humanity 

and not just rational laws. 

Spiritual tradition and modernity 

In spite of the fact that our spiritual heritage 

could have been handy to rise to the 

challenges faced by us, we failed to do so 

because of an ambivalent and confused situation 

which we faced from the days of our 

independence in 1947. In the process of becoming 

a modern nation-state we accepted a 

current of thought, powerful in the 19th century 

and the 20th century, that the continuation 

and obstructive persistence of tradition 

would block substantial modernization, as 

traditional values and institutions are incompatible 

with modernity. (Dube S. C., Tradition 

and Development, Delhi, 1990). The 

thrust of Gunnar Myrdal’s argument in his 

Asian Drama was that traditional societies 

cannot modernize themselves unless they alter 

their traditional institutions, beliefs and 

values, to suit the demands of development. 

The assumption is erroneous and has created 

quite a lot of problems for India. The institutional 

transfer, ie adopting the Western institutional 

framework in the name of modernity, 

has created a complex situation, and denied 

the central position to culture, retarding its 

functionality and reactive power considerably. 

Culture cannot be dispensed with to 

promote growth. In fact, the cavalier treatment 

meted out to tradition and culture in the 

development debate is astonishing. The 

affirmation of the positive values of culture 

and tradition is the cornerstone of India’s 

thinking and model of development. 

It does not mean that India should cling 

to tradition and deny to accept the modern 

mores of development. The vitality of India 

lies in her ability to accommodate the new 

and the upcoming into the old and the timetested, 

the ability to reorder even the past in 

the light of the present and the potential, the 

ability to welcome the new—be it a people, a 

product or an idea and make it our own, but 

keeping our identity intact. In fact, India’s 

tradition has equipped us with two very important 

characteristics. 

Resilience 

The first characteristic is resilience to 

emerge from any crisis. It is a land of great 

resilience that has learned over the millennia 

to cope with any tragedy—be it stock exchange 

bombing or twin bomb blast in 

Mumbai or Blue Star, Ayodhya or Gujarat. 

Within twenty-four hours of the stock exchange 

bombing Bombay’s traders were back 

on the floor, their burned-out computers forgotten, 

doing what they used to before technology 

changed their styles. Bombs alone 

cannot destroy India, because Indians will 

pick their way through the rubble and carry 

on as they have done throughout history. In 

her 5000 or more years of documented history, 

India has passed through every gamut of 

human experience, prosperity and adversity, 

victory and defeat, freedom and subjugation. 

India has learnt from these experiences and 

acquired a spirit of gentleness, fellowship, 

tolerance and universality. The result of this 

learning was a complete absence of aggressive 

spirit in India’s long history. Her voice 

has been the voice of peace and tolerance. 

Her great children like Mahatma Gandhi 

have proved, through the manner of conducting 

their life and work and the manner of 

accepting their death, that this voice is not a 


August


voice of weakness but of strength. 

Action as the vital force 

The second characteristic is the gift to be 

satisfied with what one has to be able to 

spend three hours doing an elaborate rangoli 

or àlpanà and finding so much happiness doing 

it knowing fully well that it would be 

swept and swabbed away the next day. It is 

not fatalism—something we are accused of. 

Neither it is unending tolerance. This is the 

outpouring of vital force which finds bliss in 

every action. However, it is said again and 

again that the problem of India is that, unlike 

the princess who could not sleep when a pea 

was placed underneath a pile of mattresses, 

we snore blissfully while lying on a bed of 

nails. It is a kind of perception which is very 

difficult for a man of the West to realize. 

My friend from England, Mr Ronald 

Lello, sent a very interesting observation 

about our unending patience to do a job. I 

quote, 

I was travelling along the main highway to 

Delhi from the north when we were stopped 

in a traffic jam. As we crept towards the 

course of this hold-up, we could see a large 

lorry—the kind which transports sand— 

which had somehow accidentally raised its 

container and deposited 20 tons of sand on 

the road. On the top of this great pile stood 

the driver. In his hands he had a sort of stick 

with a flat piece of wood nailed to it—something 

like a paddle. And with this paddle he 

was shovelling the sand all 20 tons of it, 

back into the lorry. To my eyes it was ridiculous. 

He would be there for years. And 

yet when we came alongside, I caught sight 

of his face. This man was resolute, and earnest 

and undaunted and his attention was 

untroubled by the noise of the passing traffic 

or the immensity of his task. He had a job to 

do and he was doing it. He brought me to 

life. Here was a purpose redolent of 

Herculean Labour. Ah yes, so this is India I 

thought. This is where lies the secret of 

single-pointed attention. 

Action and spirituality 

Our patience, as said, is to be combined 

with our theory of karma, but by and large 

we have failed miserably to do so and as a 

result we are accused as non-active people 

who lost its opportunity for progress by imitating 

models set up by socialism or capitalism 

or combination of both. No wonder we 

found ourselves in the worst to both the 

worlds. With the collapse of communism 

and internal pressure and thinking after a 

gap of 56 years, we are now slowly opting 

for market-friendly economic reforms. The 

irony of liberalism as said by Guru Charan 

Das is that it gives the individual free space 

in order to fashion his life, but he is unable 

to cope with the free space and fills it with 

trivial objects. Without a God or ideology, 

bourgeois life is reduced to the endless pursuit 

of cars, VCRs, DVDs and VCDs, dishwashers, 

and channel surfing. The reference 

point is the self and the individual becomes 

self-absorbed in a world of physical security 

and rational consumption. 

This is the experience of democratic 

capitalism in the West. The recent lessons 

from the Far East suggest that these nations 

too are likely to repeat the Western experience. 

Guru Charan Das’s guess is that life in 

India will also change, but it will resist more 

than others in becoming ‘dull and bleak’ because 

of the powerful hold of religion. Although 

India may compress the economic 

timetable and become prosperous in the next 

twenty-five to thirty years, it is believed that 

it will not lose out on religiosity (or the better 

word is spirituality) quite as rapidly. Spirituality 

has a powerful place in Indian life and 

the persistence of Brahman, the ultimate Reality 

is its strongest defence. This is India’s 

vitality. This is the power of Indian mind 

about which Emerson wrote a beautiful 


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poem, entitled ‘Brahma’: 

They reckon ill who leave me out; 

when me they fly, I am the wings; 

I am the doubter and the doubt, 

And I the hymn that Brahma sings 

This idea of Brahman is perceived as the 

‘non-dual reality’ that lies behind the smokescreen 

of ‘surface duality’ and its realization 

helps in understanding this universe as an 

organic web in which every item of life and 

nature is inextricably enmeshed with every 

other item. It also helps in understanding that 

this web is permeated with a cosmic force of 

which man and nature are the constituents as 

well as the contributors. In this regard, 

Jagmohan in one of his articles, ‘The Power 

of the Indian Mind’ has raised a few fundamental 

questions: Why with phenomenal 

knowledge and skills at mankind’s command, 

should things be falling apart? Why, despite 

unprecedented affluence in the present-day 

world, should there be widespread hunger, 

disease and death? Why are the UN and its 

agencies failing to attain their objective and 

coming under the domination of a few? And 

why are ideologies of the time proving inadequate 

in creating a fair and just system by 

fair and just means? 

Spirituality, adaptability and power 

of assimilation 

The answer to these questions Jagmohan 

explains lies essentially in the total disinclination 

of the modern man, particularly the 

‘power elites’ in the developed as well as the 

developing countries, to attend to the ‘Great 

Truth’ about the organic nature of life, which 

the power and profundity of Indian mind has 

laid bare hundreds of years ago and without 

understanding this, material progress alone 

minus the social and moral aspects of life can 

be precarious for our existence on this planet. 

India, one can presume, will be able to preserve 

its way of life and its civilization of 

diversity, tolerance and spirituality against 

the onslaught of the global culture which 

tends to ensure that we increasingly watch the 

same banal shows, hear the same capsuled 

news, listen to the same silly advertising slogans, 

and are moved by the same collective 

emotions. Regimentation under a consumer 

mass society of worldwide dimensions is a 

stifling prospect. To this repressing situation 

and a banal world, India offers a spiritual 

guide to the art of living. It is possible because 

of a deep and abiding religious consciousness 

which derives its strength from a 

rational and comprehensive philosophy. 

Since historic times, religion has been the 

most vital force moulding our individual and 

collective life; it is so even today. The Indian 

tradition is shot through and through by religious 

ideas and impulse. It has given the 

Indian tradition vitality to stand the vicissitudes 

of her long history, resilience and 

adaptability to adjust to changing times and 

conditions, and an amazing assimilative 

power to synthesize the new with the old, 

making for continuity in the context of 

progress. Nehru once said: 

India never ignored, in the course of her long 

history, and in spite of the other activities of 

the world, the spiritual values of life, and she 

always laid certain stress on the search for 

truth and has always welcomed the searches 

of truth by whatever names they may call 

themselves. And so India built up the tradition 

of the utmost tolerance to those who 

earnestly strive for the truth in their own way. 

It is resilience, adaptability and assimilative 

power that enable India to live and thrive. 

In the depths of Indian culture, there must be 

a focus of undying youthful vitality which has 

its origin in her spiritual thought and social 

philosophy of pluralism and co-existence. 

But what can destroy India is a change in the 

spirit of its people. It is also essential to 

accept that any political system in India must 


August


take into account the diversity of the country. 

Nehru articulated a vision of India as pluralism 

vindicated by history. He says: 

Though outwardly there was diversity and 

infinite variety among our people, everywhere 

there was that tremendous impress of 

oneness, which has held all of us together for 

ages. India’s unity was not conceived as 

something imposed from outside, a standardization 

of externals or even of beliefs. It was 

something deeper and, within its fold, the 

widest tolerance of belief and custom was 

practised and every variety acknowledged 

and encouraged. 

Continuity and change 

The challenge of Indian democracy is to 

meet the basic material needs of all Indians 

while accommodating their diverse aspirations 

within the national dream. Equally, there 

are vital areas of life, political and economic, 

in which an Indian cannot afford not to change. 

But one thing good about India is that it embraced 

democracy first and capitalism afterwards. 

This curious historic inversion suggests 

that in the event of profound challenges 

arising to the secular assumptions of Indian 

politics, to the caste structures underpinning 

society, and to the socialist consensus-driven 

economic policy, India would always be able 

to face these challenges boldly and go for a 

more negotiated and therefore peaceful transition 

into the future than, say, China. India 

might avoid some of the deleterious side-effects 

of an unprepared capitalist society, such 

as Russia. But it is more likely that absence of 

rigidity because of our pluralistic worldview 

has made us hospitable to new ideas. This left 

the way clear for experimentation from within 

and assimilation from without. Indian culture, 

religion and society bear the impress of 

this long-continued and still continuing 

experimental and assimilative approach and 

process. This explains India’s diversity and 

richness, on the one side, and its vitality and 

uninterrupted continuity, on the other. 

In fact, this idea of continuity and change 

is a very important aspect of Indian mind. I 

would like to relate an experience of mine 

which opened altogether a new scenario before 

me of the post-modernist India attempting 

to reconcile three basic sets of contradictions 

or oppositions between the past and the 

present, between the East and the West, between 

tradition and modernity. One of my 

relatives fell ill with a heartblock and was 

rushed to a hospital. It was one of the two 

most prestigious private hospitals of Delhi—a 

truly modern hospital with the latest medical 

gadgetry, set-up and management. But what 

surprised me was that in the main foyer of the 

hospital where all the important management 

units like enquiry, cash, accounts, along with 

a waiting place for the visitors were situated, 

one could find a small temple of Lord 

Ganesha in the corner. In fact, one of the 

evenings when I passed through the foyer of 

the main gate I heard the sound of a handbell: 

it was a priest doing àrati and a group of 

visitors praying with folded hands. The fragrance 

of the burning incense and the noise of 

the prayers in the silence zone of a hospital 

was quite revealing to me. It was a new metaphor 

of the socio-cultural existence of India 

which constantly explored how to relate the 

tradition to the context of modernity or how to 

develop its own modernity by absorbing its 

traditional values as well as new innovations. 

However, K. C. Bhattacharya distinguishes 

between ‘absorption’ or ‘assimilation’ and 

‘subjection’. He has no objection to the assimilation 

of anything foreign after it has been 

subjected to a thorough scrutiny; but he is 

opposed to ‘subjection’ which is an unthinking 

suppression of one’s traditional set of 

ideas by a new cast representing another culture, 

without comparison or competition. He 

wants our choice to be in accordance with the 


391


judgement of right reason. 

The dimension of rationality 

Reason is a very important factor of 

India’s vitality. It is generally said that India 

lived in a dreamland of childlike naivety and 

Indian culture is enthused by the idea of a 

mystic union with the Supreme one and hence 

Western philosophers like Hegel bluntly put it 

that Indians did not think, they did not raise 

their intuitions to concept. Matilal stoutly opposed 

this notion and confirmed on the basis 

of navya-nyàya that Indian thinking was rigorously 

theoretical and relentlessly intellectual. 

He also pointed out that Indian thought, 

even in its most metaphysical and 

soteriological concerns, was rigorously analytical, 

logical and discursive. In his inaugural 

lecture at Oxford, Matilal even said that the 

mystical illumination had a logico-linguistic 

aspect and basis. In fact, in the ancient education 

system, the notion of enquiry was very 

dominant. One is at liberty to ask questions 

and again questions if not satisfied and even 

after satisfaction again a question can be 

asked, prashnena, pariprashnena, 

pratiprashnena. The democratic process provided 

by the Constitution is to question and 

interrogate and then to resist and to subvert. If 

we do not interrogate we cannot resist, if we 

do not resist we cannot subvert and eventually 

we do not survive. We are domesticated and 

eventually consumed. In this regard may I 

recollect a mythical anecdote given in Nirukta 

written by Yàska in the 7th century B.C. It 

relates to the rishis, the seers of Veda, when 

they were departing from this earth. The men 

of this earth asked gods, who would now be 

their rishis and then gods gave them tarka 

rishi for understanding the Vedas. Tarka is 

logic, reasoning. It is, therefore, one of the 

most important dimensions of our life and the 

vitality of India. 

Conclusion 

In conclusion, one can say that one cannot 

separate India from the life-force, from an 

idea of an ever-ever land to which we belong. 

The Indian way of life presents an appealing 

alternative to the madness and emptiness of 

contemporary life and to a developed postindustrial 

liberal society that has solved its 

material problems. However, ‘Indian way of 

life’ is no substitute or excuse for a hardheaded, 

rational approach to solving our 

problems of poverty and disease. Pluralist democracy 

is our greatest strength but if our 

polity is not based on dharma it cannot act for 

the benefit of one and all. Pluralist democracy 

cannot survive without the support of dharma 

which is the extra-political normative moral 

order which is so much needed for any democracy 

to survive. It sustains public morality 

and public virtues for the proper functioning 

of the state. But dharma according to 

Kautilya’s Arthshàstra is to be jointly applied 

with wealth, artha as the standards of the 

King’s government. Economic policies are 

central to political prospects and hence one 

can conclude that the construct—pluralist democracy—hedged 

by dharma and artha, virtue 

and wealth, indicates the vitality of a nation. 

India’s disadvantage is economic, but in 

information or knowledge sectors of the 

economy India has now found its opportunity. 

If with resilience, adaptability and assimilative 

power we proceed we are sure to face the 

very real prospect of conquering the pervasive 

poverty and make the life of the majority 

of Indians prosperous—both physically as 

well as spiritually. After all, India is not just 

geography or history, it is a state of mind. • 

* Indra Nath Choudhuri is Academic Director, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. This 

article is based on the text of the Foundation-Day Oration of the Institute he delivered on 

29 January 2005. 


August

The Vitality of India - Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture

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