WHAT is modernity? If we ignore its structural components – industrialization, urbanization and a secularized state system – so as to concentrate only on modernity’s subjective ingredients, two operational definitions of modernity seem to dominate the world. In its classical formulation, modernity is that version of a lifestyle or form of cosmopolitanism that was endorsed by the Enlightenment values in seventeenth century Europe. In some form or other, this has remained the formal official and academic definition too. As it happens, the definition demands that we reconcile ourselves to the fact that seventeenth century Europe has given us all the final answers to all the crucial questions of humankind and we in Asia and Africa are left with only the responsibility to cross the ‘t’s and dot the ‘i’s and write minor footnotes to this grand enterprise.

The other definition is more popular in the Southern hemisphere, particularly among its urban middle classes. It posits that modernity is what tradition is not and is, in this sense, primarily a negation of traditions. It is a bit like the case of the colonial cities that came into being in South Asia, a civilization that had traditionally thrived on the conversations between the village and the city. Such conversations presumed that there was no diachronic or evolutionary relationship between the city and the village; the city had not grown out of the village and the fate of the village was not to become a city in the long run.

Those who subscribed to this definition seemed aware that the oldest ruins in South Asia were that of cities and they assumed that the rural and the urban complemented each other; neither was complete without the other. Nonetheless, heavily exposed to the colonial cities, most of us have come to believe over the last 200 years that villages will and should give way to a fully urbanized planet, that our cities by negating or abrogating the idea of the village have become symbols of progress. As a result, the older dialogue between the city and the village has broken down. The belief in the parallel existence of the two has collapsed. So have the cross-criticisms of the city and the village. The tradition of the village interrogating the city and the city interrogating the village is no longer a vibrant reality for this generation of South Asians.

 

Likewise, tradition and modernity are no longer in ‘live’ dialogue in this part of the world. It is that dialogue, often adversarial, that has been one of the main sources of our creativity during the last two centuries. Conversely, the modern South Asians are usually waiting for traditions to die out, to yield place to uncompromising, unalloyed modernity. The consequences of this are already becoming obvious. Three decades ago Ziauddin Sardar, futurist and a philosopher of science, recognized that the future of Asia and Africa was being systematically hijacked. Now you do not have to be a futurist to find this out. If I may repeat my own cliché, soon one billion Chinese and one billion Indians, if they lead a good and virtuous life, will not go to heaven; they will be reborn in New York. It is in this context that we are trying to salvage what we can of our cultural traditions, lying all around us as unclaimed baggage.

 

Strange cultures and cultural differences no longer surprise the modern South Asians. Such differences do not inspire us to rethink our ideas of a desirable cultural life; we have nothing to learn from either the past or the present of the southern world. For the whole of the southern world has been redefined as the past of Europe and North America. We are desperately hoping that we shall be, in the future, carbon copies of what Europe and North America are today. The social evolutionism of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has redefined us once and for all. That is why even a theorist of human emancipation, Friedrich Engels, a true brainchild of the Enlightenment and a lifelong patron and collaborator of Karl Marx, claimed when Algeria fell to France that it was good news that Algeria had been colonized by France, for it had ‘entered civilization.’

The situation has been complicated by diminishing public awareness that large parts of our cultures still remain predominantly memory dependent. We have a rich textual tradition but that tradition too has always been in dialogue with shared memories transmitted over generations – through individuals, families, large and small communities, crafts people and other guild-like structures carrying on with their traditional vocations. The textual, though always respected, was never granted monopoly status before the colonial times.

A good example is the way the two major classical systems in our music work in this part of the world. The great musicians as well as the great teachers of music, in both Hindustani and Carnatic traditions, almost totally depend on memory and so do their students. Even when both the teachers and their pupils are highly educated, they have to – or rather choose to – depend primarily on memory, not texts. No wonder that the fifty-odd universities in India from where you can graduate and even get a doctorate in music have produced excellent musicologists and historians of music but not a single noteworthy performing artist till now.

 

What I am trying to convey is that an entire continent of knowledge has been rendered inaccessible. We do not know and do not want to know how, without conservatories and formalization through texts, the musical traditions in this part of the world have survived and what really are their tools of survival. Is it possible to capture the techniques of survival through texts or digitalization? Or do we have to accept that some parts of our culture will always remain outside the reach of modern pundits and the means of formalization they know to become gradually extinct? What is true of music is also true of our craft traditions, many of our healing systems, ‘schools’ of agronomy, hydrology, metallurgy, arts and architecture.

No great creativity is possible without an ongoing dialogue between the overt and the manifest on the one hand, and the covert and the tacit on the other; between linear modernity and non-linear traditions; between the chaotic and the ambiguous on the one hand, and the orderly and the unambiguous on the other. We talk of skill development but we never take into account the way the great masters of music have taught their own children. The way Hafiz Ali Khan taught his son Amjad Ali Khan in this very city, giving him a traditional training in sarod and a modern education at a ‘normal’ school, and even allowed his gifted progeny to perform publicly at a very young age, would not have pleased today’s child rights activists. Today, he would run the risk of being accused of exploiting child labour.

While trying to sustain diversity through large, overly pre-planned and centralized projects, unknowingly we have come close to smothering diversity. The nation state has not been a dependable ally in our ventures because it is by definition committed to order, linearity and simplification of the cultural order. That is why all modern states always prefer the classical and the canonical. Not because the political class and the bureaucracy love classicism, but because the classic allows our states to sponsor and patronize without being accused of partiality. Promoting the classic looks like promoting a country’s best products nationally and internationally. Bias towards the classic, to most people, is not bias at all.

 

Let me cite another example. Ganesh Devy’s majestic People’s Survey of Living Languages shows that India has roughly 860 languages, about half of the 1652 languages mentioned in the 1961 Census. There is no trace of 300 languages mentioned in that census. The surviving languages include 30 national languages and two official languages. Politically alert, noisy sections of our middle class are quite happy if our officialdom – Sahitya Akademi, National Book Trust and the existing national award systems – do justice to these thirty languages, even though many of the remaining languages are much older than the 30 national languages and some of them have a richer heritage. Imagine the education and the culture ministries trying to do full justice to all the 860 without triggering a huge controversy.

Two other important features of our culture complicate matters. First, the Indic civilization – by that I certainly do not mean the Indian state, which has pompously appointed itself the guardian of this civilization, whereas it is the Indic civilization that arguably protects the state – has always had a special place for the covert, the ambiguous, the disorderly, the non-linear and the internally inconsistent or self-contradictory. That has been a major source of our cultural diversity and our self-confidence when faced with the unbelievable plurality of our gods and goddesses, our estimated 70,000 castes, thousands of sects and hundreds of communities that can be classified under more than one religion.

 

Second, to complicate the issue of social and cultural plurality, individual Indians tend to be plural too. Not in the sense that they are crypto-schizophrenics, but in the sense that they can host mutually inconsistent philosophies, religious beliefs, knowledge systems, ideologies, fragments of different lifestyles, incompatible experiences of socialization, and perhaps even archives of memory associated with different phases of a community’s life, at times drawn from different centuries.

In such societies one can protect plurality in the twenty first century only by defying conventional ideas of manageability, practicality and predictability associated with the nineteenth century ideas of nation state, scientific rationality and modernity. Being allegiant to our civilization means that we take into account the humblest forms and means of self-expression and refuse to see our cultural space only through the eyes of the state or through categories borrowed from currently dominant theories of progress. In effect, it also means that we may have to shed our servile loyalty to untrammelled reason untouched by compassion and empathy. Are we prepared to do that? It sounds so old-fashioned.