The interconnection, collision and mutual revision of belief

Balanced on a Billion The idea of India in the era of globalisation

Sunil Khilnani About TLM • Contact

What gives this dispute urgency is the presence of a set of palpably real processes, economic, political, cultural — each complicated in itself, and when taken together, of quite mind-boggling intricacy — that have come to be subsumed under the term ‘globalisation’. This essay considers some aspects of this process, not so much as a project to be advanced or resisted, but as a predicament: one whose defining feature is the spectacular, ever-intensifying adjacency of human experience and belief. It is this aspect of globalisation — the interconnection, collision and mutual revision of belief, brought about through technological, commercial and cultural linkages — which is the most enduring feature of the current era of globalisation, presenting, as it does, both problems and opportunities. I wish to focus upon the case of India: a segment of human experience that has a great deal to tell us about some of the possibilities and limits of this process, and one that will play an important part in shaping the future of any global society. There are several reasons why the experience of India is likely to be of great significance.

• First, one should recall India’s sheer scale: one billion people live within a single political unit, a federal state that governs a society of unparalleled social and cultural diversity.
• Second, there’s the fact of India’s existence as a democratic state and an open society. India is the most powerful and pointed challenge to those who invoke cultural factors in trying to restrict the global echo of the democratic ideal, who wish to exclude it as culturally alien.
• Third, and as an extension and deepening of this last point, India is significant because it represents a long-running encounter: between an ancient civilisation designed with the specific purpose of reproducing itself as a society, a community with a shared moral order and a common identity, and set against it, the often antithetical imperatives of modern commercial society. This society claims to link a political order that upholds individual rights and representation to an economic system of private property rights and market exchange; but as a model it is permanently threatened by the failure to reproduce itself, by a basic instability.

India’s entry into modernity has been primarily not through economics — as it has for many other societies — but rather through the medium of politics. The experience of colonialism deprived Indians of the possibility of economic self-mastery; but colonial rule did bring with it the ideas, and some of the practices, of modern politics: ideas of the state, of representative government, of rights and democracy. Such ideas connected often uneasily to traditional Indian beliefs (for instance, beliefs concerning caste hierarchy or the position of women).

But these ideas also incited Indians to self-critique and to criticism of their rulers, and led them to try to rearrange their own social and economic orders, and to secure their own liberty. Indians seized upon the principles of modernity, giving them a distinctively Indian form and content, and thereby establishing a distinction between colonialism and modernity. It was such processes — above all, the encounter between local traditions of thought and practice and Western political ideas — which created the idea that a vast and profoundly diverse society could embark upon the project of trying to live together as a single political community.

The future of the Indian idea will depend on how Indians, individually and collectively, respond to the current, most intensive cycle in the global diffusion of political ideas and economic causalities. On the other hand, the future of Western political theory — that bundle of ideas unashamedly universalist in its ambitions — will be decided outside the West. And in deciding that future, the experience of India will loom large.