Archives

Contemporary India - transitions
Edited by Peter Ronald de Souza
Sage Publications, New Delhi - California - London

Reviewed by U. Karunatilake

This book is the result of a conference organised in Lisbon in June 1998 with the support of the Fundacao Oriente of Portugal. This foundation sponsored the conference and transported a group of eminent Indian scholars to Lisbon in the summer of 1998 where they presented their deliberations to a distinguished audience, on India in transition.

Fascination with old colonies on one hand and old imperial rulers on the other is a weakness of both the rulers and the ruled. Hence these scholarly interpretations of the initial and current transitions and the arrival of this journey of change.

The papers presented examine the transitions in civilisation, in economy, in political organisation, in social forms, with a final convergence on Goa, where Lisbon once had its Eastern power base. We know that in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific the initial impact of Europe brought chaos and social breakdown and cultural confusion. The need for governance made it necessary for invaders to turn from pillage and plunder, brutal suppression of populations with new weapons and summary laws, to stable administration with attempts to understand the cultures that they had to hold down. Each colonial power had its own techniques, which varied with their own culture, and their own history of war and peace.

However even though open plunder was abandoned the prime motive of extracting wealth remained. All the modes of governance, through regimentation of labour, intrigue, education, changes in social and cultural forms, modes of agriculture, industry, and trade left each coloniser's signature of history and these are the transitions examined right up to the present even when the colonial power has departed, and five decades of grappling with the problems of subjection and partition have brought India to a new century.

The positive feature that emerge through this study of transition is the unification by governance of small territorial units into great nations like India even though negatived at the time of departure by partition and civil war. Romila Thapar's "Interpretation of Indian History: Colonial, Nationalist, Post-Colonial" puts post-colonial nationalism in its correct perspective.

"Nationalist interpretations gave rise to certain tangential interpretations, emerging partly from its own concerns and partly out of the politics of the 1920s and 1930s. One of these regarded as a fringe activity at the time but which has become much more central in the last ten years, was the writing of history based on religious nationalism and relating primarily to the identities of communities as Hindu or Muslim. This gave rise to communal interpretations of India's past. They were motivated primarily by the politics of the 1920s and 30s and became extremely influential in interpreting the pre-modern period in particular because it was during this period that the Hindu community and the Muslim community as identifiable communities or, as many argued as identifiable nations, were thought to have been established."

So these "nation" fragments are a post-colonial artefact, a creation of the departing colonial power as much as the classes and compradors who take over power from them and keep the outflow of profit ensured.

The other positive feature, the infusion of industrial know-how, science and technology, which would have been the base of a new society forged within the same decades in the Soviet Republics and China, has in India been an amorphous phenomenon with transitions following the old capital flows. Thus the verdict that emerges is that transition without ideology is a social and economic maze.

www.crescat.com

News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security
Politics | World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries

Produced by Lake House
Copyright © 2003 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager