Osian's Auction Catalogue India The Passionate Detachment | February 2001

11 I Before venturing into the issues of idealism and its materiality, it is important to just summarise one’s reading of India’s present situation, in terms of the main forces at work in moulding her nature and direction. At present, India is holding her sense of identity very heavily. The revival dominating her institutional values border upon a jingoistic sense of insecurity. The defensiveness hiding behind the bravado is leading to many ad hoc and partially understood institutional mechanisms. In this necessary fever to reassert, values emanating from a mediocre definition of religion are overwhelming previous attempts (mostly feeble) at a secular and more tolerant atmosphere to pervade the interactions between India’s religions and communities. This stampede to identify with any easy and popularised aspect of Hinduism is corrupting an already eroded habit of intelligent public debate, self-criticism and dialogue. Concepts of artistic and intellectual freedom have lost their public respect. Naturally, attitudes of avoidance are replacing attitudes of absorption. This encourages the transformation of difference into division, into barrier and into conflict. It is easy to place the blame on the fanatics; yet all of us are to be blamed for the system being hijacked so easily. Of course, sooner or later Hinduism will evolve a deeper sense of introspection, as divisions will be created and reform becomes inevitable. Yet at present, she seems to believe she has earned the right to shout loudly with anger, because for years she has tolerated and today she sees no tangible benefit in that tolerance, no clear glory for her philosophical wisdom; she feels that those who promised have failed her, they have not built her the home and institutions as envisaged. A backlash is inevitable, the intellectuals and bureaucrats are discredited, the politicians change with little shame too easily, and so amid the frustration and fear the clever have hijacked our inheritance, from ideas to monuments, in the name of silent seers and insecure gods. Further, the value-systems of the British-inherited legacy are already weakened after the post-modern criticism of colonial prejudice. The systems inherited from other minority religions and communities are also dissolving into irrelevancy, vis- a-vis the national scale, though for different reasons. This essentially leaves the Hindu temple as the only prospering institution. Hand in hand with these shifting attitudes comes the relatively liberalised and still highly inequitable flow of economic values. The entrepreneurship required to generate wealth on the scale India demands is evolving too slowly. Further, the recognition by the corporate world of their wider duty of building the essential infrastructure and welfare systems, is not growing at the pace required. Irrespective of international trends towards dismantling welfare systems and the consequences of fiscal-deficit funding, India must resist these temptations. Yet such resistance demands alternative means of generating and redistributing wealth. It is here that the arts, culture and its education will urgently have to devote visionary effort. Amid all these forces are the implications of half-baked globalisation. The present open-ended postmodern pluralistic relativism is beginning to tire people, especially in the urban west. As a result there is a latching onto narrower identities, a retreat upon the easy-to-verify local crutch. In India, the frustration worsens as opportunities open up but a sense of belonging does not emerge. Globalisation is hence witnessing a simultaneous increase in communal mentalities. This has led to international exchange not having a very positive philosophical impact upon social attitudes.