on harmonising extremes

Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true
-Joan Robinson (1903 - 1983)

An attractive statement, just because it is so bizarre. But this teacher of Manmohan Singh from Cambridge [1] had got it right in more than one ways. She spent three years in pre-Independence India with her husband, Austin, also an economist. She admired the Chinese leftist policies a lot and that clearly reflected in her teaching. Since reasoning is something all can do, and Manmohan Singh certainly did, that helped him get a nice balance between capitalistic and communist ideologies.

Nirad Chaudhuri wrote once that in India even exceptions run into millions. Thus what is true for the majority, for the exceptions the opposite is likely to be true. Also, in India, if you are one in a million, there are a thousand like you. Clearly it is important to respect the concerns and basic rights of
others, even if they are a minority.

Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru had said in his "Discovery of India":
There is a tendency on the parts of Indian writers, to which I have also partly succumbed, to give selected extracts and quotations from the writings of European scholars in praise of old Indian literature and philosophy. It would be easy, indeed much easier, to give other extracts giving an exactly opposite viewpoint.

Amartya Sen [2] likens James Mill's depiction of India (compiled without visiting India) as a grotesquely primitive culture, and that of Hindu nationalists' depiction as a dazzlingly glorious culture. Both tend to magnify differences and thus tend to separate our humane commonalities from the rest of the world.

The unfortunate part in all this is that there are many worthwhile achievements which get ignored because they do not fit the pattern that is being magnified. India's richness, nay, uniqueness, is essentially due to its occupying the entire spectrum of diversity in all walks of life. We need to not just preserve it, but encourage it. Only then can we evolve to a better state. Else we are likely to live the life of a kupamanduk sampling life in our narrow way.


While embracing Yin, be sure to embrace Yang too.


[1] Manmohan Singh
[2] Chapter 7 of "Argumentative Indian"