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The Hindu Art of War

02 Sat Jan 2016

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Hinduism and the Ethics of Warfare in South AsiaRoy, Kaushik. Hinduism and the Ethics of Warfare in South Asia: From Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 305 pp.

Hinduism, and South Asia more broadly, has been a glaring lacuna in the study of military history and ethics. Kaushik Roy’s Hinduism and the Ethics of Warfare in South Asia: From Antiquity to the Present (henceforth HEWSA) is unfortunately a poor attempt to rectify that oversight. Although HEWSA passes as an introduction to the uninitiated, it leaves most of the important questions that vex military historians of South Asia unanswered. Although the author’s attempt to place warfare and ethics within their cultural moorings rather than posit them as universal axioms is appreciated, the wider ambitions of his work in presenting South Asia to a Western audience takes away from a focussed analysis of military matters. To be fair to Roy, however, the topic and timeframe presents a Herculean project that would require expertise not just in military affairs but also archaeology and several languages to accomplish thoroughly. This explains why a choice was made – wisely – to restrict the study only to ‘elite’ Sanskrit circles that had the greatest influence on policy. It should also be mentioned at the outset that for the purposes of this review – and most of HEWSA, South Asia is synonymous with India and the dharmic systems that abide within.

The question before any study of military ethics is what constitutes just war and how it should be waged. When it comes to South Asia, scholars would first have to dispel the notion that the region has never known the practice of strategic thinking; second, they would also have to break away from the overpowering Europeanising grand narrative of universal history that places the experiences of the western end of the Eurasian landmass as the normative centrestage. HEWSA begins by asking basic questions on the nature of war and politics instead of accepting readily available theories from the Western canon. Roy, however, sets up the strategists of India in a conversation with their Western (and Eastern) counterparts rather than in opposition; clearly, he does not wish to settle for the simplistic binary of East vs. West that still colours comparative studies across specialties. This is certainly a strength of the book though also a weakness as I will explain later.

Roy establishes his project as trying to answer four questions: 1. What is war?; 2. What constitutes proper justification for going to war?; 3. How should war be waged?; and 4. What are the consequences of waging war? Strategists long before Prussian military theorist h have wrestled with these questions, and the answers each civilisation has proposed to these questions are today obfuscated by a 20th century technological determinism and a Euro-American pragmatism. As historian Jeremy Black has pointed out, not all societies were driven by the motivation to come up with the most combat-effective machines because their worldviews were different; culture is the key to understanding military strategy. The import of this observation should not be diluted to posit a facile dichotomy of Western rationality versus Eastern spiritualism or wars of honour. In fact, as military scholar Michael Handel noted, the basic rationality of strategy as political behaviour is universal. Kamandaka, believed to be a 4th century strategist in the Gupta court, for example, speaks of the importance of the people’s support for a righteous war to ensure stability – a value dear to the heart of several Western strategists as well.

Yet it would be equally unhelpful to overemphasise the similarities between different approaches to war: Indian thinkers like Chanakya and Manu were, for example, as concerned with the potential for insurgency as they were with facing foreign enemies. Indian authors rarely put their names to their treatises either; furthermore, they usually contained the amalgam of strategic thought before their period though again not always with proper citation. As a result, it is a challenge to date Indian theories of state and warfare as it is difficult to put author to treatise. Concerned as they were with dharmayuddha and kutayuddha, Indian strategists were also a product of their times: Chanakya’s Arthashastra proposes a boldly expansionist state as he wrote during the waxing of Maurya power while Kamandaka’s Nitisara is more cautious as the Gupta Empire was on the defensive from nomadic invaders from Central Asia. Perhaps the greatest difference between Indian and Western thinking on the state and warfare, as Roy astutely observes, is that Eastern societies did not view the state as an abstract principle: there was a relation between tao and the people in China just as there was between rashtra and society in India. European thinkers, on the other hand, seem to view the state more contractually and legalistically, although this is more true with modern theorists than ancient Europeans.

The greatest difference between Indian ethical texts and their Western equivalents, however, is that the former are more theoretical and describe the world as it should be, not as it is, while the converse is true for the latter. Although Roy observes this, he fails to realise how important a point he has stumbled on – Indian morality, even on the field of battle, are not as clearly defined as in the West. This is a strong reflection of dharmic thinking on matters of state and it is possible that Western thinking was similarly and equally influenced by Abrahamic certitude of the world. Yet to be fair, expounding on this would lead him away from the main topic of his study. Finally, an interesting observation by Torkel Brekke, historian of religion, about differences between Indian and European military thought is that the latter comprises of equal attention to jus ad bellum (just cause for war) and jus in bello (just conduct in war) while the former only concerns itself with the latter. The author mentions this in the introduction but disappointingly never returns to the matter explicitly later in the book. From the structure of other arguments, the reader is only left to assume that it has something to do with how Indian strategists viewed the nature of politics and conflict but some clarity would have helped.

The greatest weakness of HEWSA is the author’s willingness to indulge in simplifications about Hinduism that muddy the reader’s understanding of Indian society. Given the author’s belief that society and culture are inextricably linked to military strategy, this is an unacceptable lapse. For example, Roy repeatedly harps on the role of kshatriyas as the warrior class in South Asian society. While this may broadly be true, it does not explain how most of India’s major empires were not of kshatriya lineage. Nor does it explain how Indian emperors could sustain large standing armies based on conscription if only kshatriyas could wage war. After the fall of Rome, it was not until the 19th century in Europe that a professional class of soldiers emerged. In the interim, armies were usually composed of farmers who had to return to their fields during harvest season. As a result, war was limited to specific periods of the calendar or the economy would suffer if farmers could not return to their fields on time. If Indian polities did not follow this rule, it is an important social and economic difference that was worth highlighting. Admittedly, Roy merely repeats the formulation of Indian philosophers on the matter but as he has been quick to point out in other aspects, Indian thinkers addressed an idealised world and not the real one. Instead, a brief explanation of varna and jati would have left readers with a clearer understanding of what actually was and what was supposed to be.

The author’s implicit acceptance of the Indo-Aryan Migration Theory (IAMT) is another factor that mars this study. Basically, IAMT was proposed by British and German Orientalists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries after the discovery of the Indo-European language family and postulates that the Indian subcontinent was subject to large population migrations from the Caucasus and Central Asia in three waves, the first around 2,200 BCE, the second around 1,700 BCE, and the final one around 1,000 BCE. In the mid-1940s, British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler suggested that these waves had perhaps been invasions rather than migrations but this variation of the IAMT, referred to as the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), did not hold for long though it has been the strawman subject of innumerable critiques of the IAMT. Regardless, given the controversies around the subject, any scholar touching upon the topic peripherally ought to warn the reader of the assumptions made.

Roy suggests that the rules governing the war towards the end of the Ramayana were more lax than in the great fratricidal war of the Mahabharata…or at least, there seemed to be more anguish and hand-wringing at the violation of rules in the latter epic than the former. This he supposes is due to the different rules governing warfare within and without groups. The assumption here, stemming from his thoughts on the IAMT, is that Rama was an Aryan king fighting a non-Aryan king, Ravana, while the Pandavas and Kauravas were both Aryan families. In the former situation, there were few rules of just war whereas the latter had strict codes. Of course, this fails to explain how Ravana, a non-Aryan chieftain, was a great devotee of Shiva and a brahmin – outsiders would never be accorded a varna (improperly translated into English as caste). More importantly, there is no textual evidence for this supposition in the primary sources – the author cites secondary sources to back his claim, a source whose racial categories are strongly influenced by the orientalism of British Indology.

With the rise of Buddhism and Jainism, Roy correctly points out that these systems are not as pacifist or as ascetic as are commonly believed: the founders of both were themselves kshatriyas and both had several royal friends throughout their lives; Buddha was not even a vegetarian! Buddhist and Jain ahimsa was closer to the Hindu concept as expounded in the Chandogya Upanishad, related to austerity, generosity, sacrifice, truthfulness, and integrity, and not the passive non-violence of Mohandas Gandhi. Roy’s exposition is a much-needed correction to the common narrative on Buddhism and Jainism. However, he insists on seeing both these belief systems as schisms from Hinduism – a view that is not shared by many scholars of the latter.

A whole chapter is dedicated to the most famous treatise on war and politics to come out of India, the Arthashastra. The treatise is briefly summarised before its author is compared to European political philosophers and military theorists from Plato to the authors of Fourth Generation Warfare. Roy relies heavily on secondary sources, preferring the words of his contemporary scholars than of the masters themselves. In the evaluation, the Arthashastra emerges as an amoral text that was quite comfortable with kutayuddha as well as dharmayuddha and considered internal as well as external threats to the kingdom. Chanakya advocates diplomacy, assassinations, poisoning, temporary alliances, espionage, biological warfare, and any other means that can deliver victory. The focus is on strategic knowledge of the enemy than on tactical advice and Chankaya does not stop with victory: the Indian strategist considers the best ways of controlling a defeated foe as part of his analytical package. Contrary to Western armies, Indian victors allowed the conquered to maintain their language, dress, customs, and gods; only the unrighteous rulers were removed. Unlike Western theorists, Roy observes, Chanakya’s theories make human agency instead of inter-state structure the primary variable in politics. Furthermore, there is no mention of seapower, nor is there any consideration of technology as a force multiplier in battle.

Instead of the long comparative section, the topic would have been better served if a closer analysis of the Arthashastra, its author, and their milieu were attempted. How did the political, social, and economic realities of the early Maurya Empire influence Chanakya’s thoughts? How much is he a product of his time? What were the challenges to Mauryan rule at the time? Why did the Mauryans dedicate their efforts to conquering India and not send their armies westwards? The answers to these questions would have situated the Arthashastra in its own context and revealed more about warfare and ethics in South Asia than do the quick comparisons to Western and Eastern strategists. After all, it is not the Western theorists who are understudied but the South Asian context.

Roy’s discussion of early medieval India leaves much to be desired. Again, led astray by his sources, Roy argues that brahmin intellectuals of the period saw the Bactrians and Parthians as mlechchas because of their patronage of Buddhism. This would not have solved the problem of local Indian chieftains who patronised Buddhism or those who followed it and it seems bizarre that the brahmins would follow this half-measure that achieved nothing. Roy also claims that the Sunga and Kanva dynasties were established by brahmins to fight off the sudra ascendancy seen in the rise of the Nandas and Mauryas! It is in this context, the author claims, that the Manavadharmashastra was written and as a result, the primary aim of its author was to preserve the status of brahmins. While Chanakya had concentrated on artha and kama, Manu focused on dharma.

Manu is the first Indian strategist that we know of to mention seapower. Kalidasa is another but in both cases, the authors limit themselves to riverine navies and not bluewater vessels. Manu is also the first Indian strategist to show a liking for cavalry, even suggesting that the king not wage war in the absence of good cavalry. Chanakya had advocated a balanced composition of forces between infantry, cavalry, chariots, and elephants while Kamandaka had emphasised the shock value of elephants. However, Manu is more cautious than the author of the Arthashastra and voices a preference for coalitions of likeminded rulers against a common threat than a quest for power by one emperor. Oddly, though, unlike most commanders, he preferred fortress warfare to open battle despite the hardships of disease, logistics, and discipline. The army would live off the enemy’s land, laying siege to the enemy’s fort while pillaging the countryside.

In general, Indian strategists preferred to solve things through diplomacy and wealth over arms; this is the same advice one gets from Chanakya, Manu, Kalidasa, Kamandaka, Somadeva, and others though they also strongly advised against shunning violence. Later thinkers, however, accepted the use of kutayuddha more readily, especially if it could prevent war altogether. According to Roy, Kalidasa advised that dharmayuddha be followed only against Indian monarchs and not against the Yavanas; similarly, it was permissible for a victorious king to annex the kingdoms of his defeated foes outside India but not within. The development of a geographic sense of India in this period is an interesting facet that Roy does not dwell on.

The author suggests that Somadeva warned against sending armies to the northwest – this would correspond to the region whence most invasions of India occurred and usually by a foe with superior technology. Unfortunately, Roy has little more to say about this either. Something else Roy mentions is Thiruvalluvar’s advice that an army look grand and imposing. Clearly, the Tamil thinker understood the psychological dimension of warfare well and tried to bring it into play in service of his patron. The lessons of these books on strategy did not remain restricted to the elite but trickled into the Hitopadesha, Panchatantra, Kathasaritsagara, and other stories in simplified form. What the reception was is a difficult question to answer. One wonders if the wisdom of Indian military thinking was noticed by foreigners when these works were translated, first into Persian and then later into Arabic and Latin.

The descriptions of Indian treatises on strategy raise many questions that Roy does not answer. For example, Indian monarchs seemed to always lack cavalry of sufficient quality and quantity. Yet no king ever tried to address this shortcoming by importing and breeding horses in India.  Kalhana, the author of Rajatarangini, mentions that the Palas and Senas of Bengal attempted to import cavalry from Afghanistan and South China, and the Hoysalas tried to crossbreed Arab mares with local breeds to no avail. When the Romans, Greeks, Persians, and Carthaginians could take elephants from India, why could Indian traders not acquire war horses? Although the problem of a weak cavalry was temporarily solved under some kings such as Vikramaditya of the Gupta dynasty or Harshavardhana of Thaneshwar and Kanauj, it remained an issue until the very end. In relation to the equine lacuna, India did not develop metal stirrups or horseshoes until much later either and this gave the Hunnic mounted archers a tremendous advantage in battle; the invaders’ composite bows also gave them greater range than their Indian opponents. Why did Indian rulers fail so spectacularly in developing or acquiring military technology despite their use of spies or their fame in trade? This would have been an important question in a military history of South Asia.

Indian reflections on warfare declined with the Islamic invasions of the subcontinent. Warriors for a jealous desert god, Muslims rulers removed Hindu advisors of the conquered Indian kings from imperial service and closed the avenue for contribution to political life. Most Hindus who continued in royal service were forced to convert if they wished to retain their positions. The Hindu kingdoms that resisted the invaders, however, did not fare better than their ancestors did in terms of learning newer and more effective military strategies and technologies. The Rajputs, for example, held to their code of personal glory on the battlefield and failed to see the evolution of mass tactics; similarly, the Nayakas in the south were disdainful of gunpowder and thought it to be weapons for the cowardly – a regressive attitude that only shattered their armies when they went up against more modern opponents. The Rajput and Nayaka views were prevalent among European knights too when they first came across the Ottoman janissaries. The social and economic structure of feudal Europe had created the European knight, a fearsome force in one-on-one combat but no match for hurtling pellets of lead. Where the Europeans adapted quickly, Indian polities failed to do so. Nowhere is this more clear than in the Shukranitisara, a work by an unknown author written around the late 17th century.

The Shukranitisara, like any work on military matters, emphasises the training of soldiers to fight with or without arms. However, it shuns the use of warfare with mechanical devices – gunpowder, siege engines, etc. – as asurayuddha, a particularly barbaric form of kutayuddha. The concept existed even in earlier treatises such as the Arthashastra but where Chanakya used the term ‘asurayuddha‘ to define heinous practices to be avoided by a victor, such as the massacre of the males of the royal household, the violation of their women, and the appropriation of their wealth, the author of Shukranitisara reserved the term for battlefield practices that had become routine. One might pontificate over the degeneration of chivalry but such matters concerned only romantic bards while the strategists were not beyond recommending kutayuddha in the pursuit of a quicker and cheaper victory. Not only were foreign invaders less delicate about such concerns, but Muslim armies frequently desecrated Hindu places of worship, forced conversions, massacred the citizenry, raped and sold the royal women into slavery, and killed their menfolk. It was in response to this barbarism that Rajput women took to jauhar.

Although Roy accepts the atrocities of the Muslim conquests, he nonetheless enters into the record Romila Thapar’s claim that there was no sense of Hinduism in this period. He also cites Richard Eaton on how limited the damage from the Islamic invasions were. This is deeply unconvincing given the tales of conversion and massacre contained in his own study.

Roy takes the reader through the Indian freedom struggle and ends his study with a few short comments on India’s nuclear posture. However, these periods hardly reflect any thought on the ethics of warfare understood in the conventional sense. Even accepting Chanakya’s paradigm of inter- and intra-state warfare, passive non-violence seems a tool that may have, at best, suited a particular situation rather than be an entire ethical theory of warfare in itself.

Perhaps the biggest question Roy does not attempt to answer is why Indian polities remained thoroughly inept at war. Barring a brief period in the Chola Empire, no Indian kingdom ever extended beyond the boundaries of Akhand Bharat; furthermore, there was a total failure to develop or even adopt superior technologies in a timely manner. Why were Indian monarchs not able to do what rulers in most other parts of the world did routinely? A second ‘big question’ Roy could have shed light on is to what extent these theories were discussed and debated. Was there even a limited and elite public sphere in which ideas of warfare were discussed and improved upon? How well did these ideas survive transmission as one dynasty replaced another? Roy indicates that Indian treatises dealt with the ideal world more than they dealt with reality. However, what effect did the results of real battles have on them?

It is possible that these questions can never be answered for lack of sources. Nonetheless, they deserve a vigorous discussion that HEWSA did not provide. The author’s excessive reliance on secondary sources and translations also deserves comment. Although South Asia is a difficult region that demands its scholars to have a command over several languages and kills, any analysis as important as Roy’s project ought not be done without expertise in at least some of the skills and languages; perhaps a collaborative work would have achieved the desired result better. It is said that reviewers often discuss the book they would have written rather than the book at hand – this may be the case here too but any study that claims to discuss the ethics of warfare in South Asia cannot afford these lapses, particularly in a field where much of the groundwork is yet to be laid.

Re-Evaluating the Saraswati-Sindhu Civilisation

26 Wed Jan 2011

Posted by in India, South Asia

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The basic premise of Ancient Indian History has been the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), which posits that a group of fair Central Asians (probably from somewhere in the Caucasus) invaded India and displaced the darker natives southwards. The civilisation most directly impacted by this was the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC), known by its two biggest discoveries in 1922, Harappa (24,000 inhabitants) and Mohenjo-daro (35,000 inhabitants). This civilisation was, according to this theory, centred around the Indus river system, and expanded from Bactria in central Iran to Lothal in Gujarat. By implication, the people were of Dravidian stock, short and dark like modern South Indians. This is all a fabulous tale – were it the plot of a Mel Gibson movie in the vein of Apocalypto. Sadly, it is also the dominant strain in academic discourse as is evidenced not only by scholarly papers archaeology, history, and population genetics,.but also the California textbook controversy in 2005. Recently, the AIT has been modified by some to a migration theory. So now, Aryans moved into India from Central Asia and settled down without war and bloodshed posited earlier. To be fair, the jury is still out on the AIT, but with each genetic study done, the assumptions of the theory are being whittled away. Add to that a complete lack of evidence in archaeology and contemporary literature, AIT seems to stand on pretty flimsy ground.

Since the early 1990s, the Indian subcontinent has been the focus of many genetic studies, most of which seem to yield divergent conclusions. This is because (1) India is one of the most diverse and complex genetic pools in the world; (2) early studies relied on too limited samples, a few dozens, when hundreds or ideally thousands of samples are required for some statistical reliability; (3) some of the early studies fell into the old trap of trying to equate linguistic groups with distinct ethnic entities — a relic of the nineteenth-century erroneous identification between language and race; as a result, a genetic connection between North Indians and Central Asians was automatically taken to confirm an Aryan invasion in the second millennium BCE, disregarding a number of alternative explanations. More recent studies, rectifying the errors of previous studies and building on their less controversial results, have reached very different conclusions.

One study conducted by the Estonian biologist Toomas Kivisild relied on 550 samples of mtDNA and identified a haplogroup called “U” as indicating a deep connection between Indian and Western-Eurasian populations. However, the authors extrapolated a very remote separation of the two branches, rather than a recent population movement towards India. They note, “the subcontinent served as a pathway for eastward migration of modern humans” from Africa, some 40,000 years ago: “We found an extensive deep late Pleistocene genetic link between contemporary Europeans and Indians, provided by the mtDNA haplogroup U, which encompasses roughly a fifth of mtDNA lineages of both populations. Our estimate for this split [between Europeans and Indians] is close to the suggested time for the peopling of Asia and the first expansion of anatomically modern humans in Eurasia and likely pre-dates their spread to Europe.” In other words, the timescale posited by the AIT framework is inadequate, and the genetic affinity between the Indian subcontinent and Europe “should not be interpreted in terms of a recent admixture of western Caucasoids with Indians caused by a putative Indo-Aryan invasion 3,000–4,000 years BP (before present).” Another study, by U.S. biological anthropologist Todd Disotell, found that migrations into India “did occur, but rarely from western Eurasian populations.” Disotell wrote, “The supposed Aryan invasion of India 3,000–4,000 years before present therefore did not make a major splash in the Indian gene pool. This is especially counter-indicated by the presence of equal, though very low, frequencies of the western Eurasian mtDNA types in both southern and northern India. Thus, the ‘caucasoid’ features of south Asians may best be considered ‘pre-caucasoid’ — that is, part of a diverse north or north-east African gene pool that yielded separate origins for western Eurasian and southern Asian populations over 50,000 years ago.” Here again, the Eurasian connection is therefore traced to the original migration out of Africa. On the genetic level, “the supposed Aryan invasion of India 3000-4000 years ago was much less significant than is generally believed.”

In a study by Susanta Roychoudhury in 2000, 644 samples of mtDNA from some ten Indian ethnic groups, especially from the East and South were analysed. They found “a fundamental unity of mtDNA lineages in India, in spite of the extensive cultural and linguistic diversity,” pointing to “a relatively small founding group of females in India.” Significantly, “most of the mtDNA diversity observed in Indian populations is between individuals within populations; there is no significant structuring of haplotype diversity by socio-religious affiliation, geographical location of habitat or linguistic affiliation.” That is a crucial observation, which later studies will endorse: on the maternal side at least, there is no such thing as a “Hindu” or “Muslim” genetic identity, nor even a high- or low-caste one, a North- or South-Indian one — hence the expressive title of the study: “Fundamental genomic unity of ethnic India is revealed by analysis of mitochondrial DNA.” The authors also noted that haplogroup “U,” already noted by Kivisild et al. as being common to North Indian and “Caucasoid” populations, was found in tribes of eastern India such as the Lodhas and Santals, which would not be the case if it had been introduced through Indo-Aryans. Such is also the case of the haplogroup “M,” another marker frequently mentioned in the early literature as evidence of the invasion: in reality, “we have now shown that indeed haplogroup M occurs with a high frequency, averaging about 60%, across most Indian population groups, irrespective of geographical location of habitat. We have also shown that the tribal populations have higher frequencies of haplogroup M than caste populations.” Also in 2000, Kivisild and his team stressed the importance of the mtDNA haplogroup “M” common to India (with a frequency of 60%), Central and Eastern Asia (40% on average), and even to American Indians; however, this frequency drops to 0.6% in Europe, which is “inconsistent with the ‘general Caucasoidness’ of Indians.” This shows, once again, that “the Indian maternal gene pool has come largely through an autochthonous history since the Late Pleistocene.” The authors then studied the “U” haplogroup, finding its frequency to be 13% in India, almost 14% in North-West Africa, and 24% from Europe to Anatolia; but, in their opinion, “Indian and western Eurasian haplogroup U varieties differ profoundly; the split has occurred about as early as the split between the Indian and eastern Asian haplogroup M varieties. The data show that both M and U exhibited an expansion phase some 50,000 years ago, which should have happened after the corresponding splits.” In other words, there is a genetic connection between India and Europe, but a far more ancient one than was thought.

Another important point is that looking at mtDNA as a whole, “even the high castes share more than 80 per cent of their maternal lineages with the lower castes and tribals”; this obviously runs counter to the AIT thesis. Taking all aspects into consideration, the authors conclude: “We believe that there are now enough reasons not only to question a ‘recent Indo-Aryan invasion’ into India some 4000 BP, but alternatively to consider India as a part of the common gene pool ancestral to the diversity of human maternal lineages in Europe.”

In later studies, Kivisild dealt with the origin of languages and agriculture in India. He stressed India’s genetic complexity and antiquity, since “present-day Indians [possess] at least 90 per cent of what we think of as autochthonous Upper Palaeolithic maternal lineages.” They also observed that “the Indian mtDNA tree in general [is] not subdivided according to linguistic (Indo-European, Dravidian) or caste affiliations,” which again demonstrates the old error of conflating language and race or ethnic group. Then, in a new development, they punched holes in the methodology followed by studies basing themselves on the Y-DNA (the paternal line) to establish the Aryan invasion, and point out that if one were to extend their logic to populations of Eastern and Southern India, one would be led to an exactly opposite result: “the straightforward suggestion would be that both Neolithic (agriculture) and Indo-European languages arose in India and from there, spread to Europe.” In yet another study with L. Cavalli-Sforza and P. A. Underhill, Kivisild undertook a particularly detailed examination of the genetic heritage of India’s earliest settlers, using nearly a thousand samples from the subcontinent, including two Dravidian-speaking tribes from Andhra Pradesh.15 Among other important findings, it stressed that the Y-DNA haplogroup “M17,” regarded till recently as a marker of the Aryan invasion, and indeed frequent in Central Asia, is equally found in the two tribes under consideration, which is inconsistent with the AIT framework. Moreover, one of the two tribes, the Chenchus, is genetically close to several castes, so that there is a “lack of clear distinction between Indian castes and tribes,” a fact that can hardly be overemphasized.

This also emerges from a diagram of genetic distances between eight Indian and seven Eurasian populations, distances calculate on the basis of 16 Y-DNA haplogroups. The diagram challenges many common assumptions: as just mentioned, five castes are grouped with the Chenchus; another tribe, the Lambadis, is stuck between Western Europe and the Middle East; Bengalis of various castes are close to Bombay Brahmins, and Punjabis are as far away as possible from Central Asia! It is clear that no simple framework can account for such complexity, least of all the AIT framework. Mait Metspalu confirmed the results of this study by analysing 796 Indian (including both tribal and caste populations from different parts of India) and 436 Iranian mtDNAs and concluding, “Language families present today in India, such as Indo-European, Dravidic and Austro-Asiatic, are all much younger than the majority of indigenous mtDNA lineages found among their present-day speakers at high frequencies. It would make it highly speculative to infer, from the extant mtDNA pools of their speakers, whether one of the listed above linguistically defined group in India should be considered more autochthonous than any other in respect of its presence in the subcontinent.”

Indian biologist Sanghamitra Sengupta, together with L. Cavalli-Sforza, Partha P. Majumder, and P. A. Underhill, undertook a study in 2006 on 728 samples covering 36 Indian populations. His findings were no different from Kivisild’s. For instance, the authors rejected the identification of some Y-DNA genetic markers with an “Indo- European expansion,” an identification they called “convenient but incorrect … overly simplistic.” To them, the subcontinent’s genetic landscape was formed much earlier than the dates proposed for an Indo-Aryan immigration: “The influence of Central Asia on the pre-existing gene pool was minor. … There is no evidence whatsoever to conclude that Central Asia has been necessarily the recent donor and not the receptor of the R1a lineages.” Most significantly, this study indirectly rejected a “Dravidian” authorship of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization, since it noted, “Our data are also more consistent with a peninsular origin of Dravidian speakers than a source with proximity to the Indus….” They found, in conclusion, “overwhelming support for an Indian origin of Dravidian speakers.”

Another Indian biologist, Sanghamitra Sahoo, working with Kivisild and V. K. Kashyap, for a study of the Y-DNA of 936 samples covering 77 Indian populations, 32 of them tribes. The authors left no room for doubt: “The sharing of some Y-chromosomal haplogroups between Indian and Central Asian populations is most parsimoniously explained by a deep, common ancestry between the two regions, with diffusion of some Indian- specific lineages northward.” So the southward gene flow that had been imprinted on our minds for two centuries was wrong, after all: the flow was out of, not into, India. The authors continue: “The Y-chromosomal data consistently suggest a largely South Asian origin for Indian caste communities and therefore argue against any major influx, from regions north and west of India, of people associated either with the development of agriculture or the spread of the Indo-Aryan language family.”

The last of the two rejected associations is that of Indo-Aryan expansion – the first, that of the spread of agriculture, is the well-known thesis of Colin Renfrew, which traces Indo-European origins to the beginnings of agriculture in Anatolia, and sees Indo-Europeans entering India around 9000 BP, along with agriculture: Sanghamitra Sahoo et al. see no evidence of this in the genetic record. The same data also reveals that “the caste populations of ‘north’ and ‘south’ India are not particularly more closely related to each other than they are to the tribal groups,” an important confirmation of earlier studies. In particular, “Southern castes and tribals are very similar to each other in their Y-chromosomal haplogroup compositions.” As a result, “it was not possible to confirm any of the purported differentiations between the caste and tribal pools,” a momentous conclusion that directly clashes with the Aryan paradigm, which imagined Indian tribes as adivasis and the caste Hindus as descendants of Indo-Aryans invaders or immigrants. In reality, we have no way, today, to determine who in India is an “adi”-vasi, but enough data to reject this label as misleading and unnecessarily divisive.

It is, of course, still possible to find genetic studies finding differences between North and South Indians or higher and lower castes but that may be because of a certain nocebo effect caused by two centuries of acculturation (or suspect randomisation, size of sample, and referent). The studies cited above argue overwhelmingly for an unequivocal rejection of a 3500-BP arrival of a “Caucasoid” or Central Asian gene pool. Just as the Aryan invasion/migration left no trace in Indian literature, in the archaeological and the anthropological record, it is invisible at the genetic level. The agreement between these different fields is remarkable by any standard, and gives us the opportunity to reconsider our linguistic and historical preconceptions. Secondly, they account for India’s considerable genetic diversity by using a time- scale not of a few millennia, but of 40,000 or 50,000 years. In fact, several experts, such as Lluís Quintana-Murci, Vincent Macaulay, Stephen Oppenheimer, Michael Petraglia, and others, have in the last few years proposed that when Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa, he first reached South-West Asia around 75,000 BP, and from here, went on to other parts of the world. In simple terms, except for Africans, all humans have ancestors in the North-West of the Indian peninsula. In particular, one migration started around 50,000 BP towards the Middle East and Western Europe: indeed, nearly all Europeans — and by extension, many Americans — can trace their ancestors to only four mtDNA lines, which appeared between 10,000 and 50,000 years ago and originated from South Asia.” In Oppenheimer’s own words, “For me and for Toomas Kivisild, South Asia is logically the ultimate origin of M17 and his ancestors; and sure enough we find the highest rates and greatest diversity of the M17 line in Pakistan, India, and eastern Iran, and low rates in the Caucasus. M17 is not only more diverse in South Asia than in Central Asia, but diversity characterizes its presence in isolated tribal groups in the south, thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a ‘male Aryan invasion’ of India. One average estimate for the origin of this line in India is as much as 51,000 years. All this suggests that M17 could have found his way initially from India or Pakistan, through Kashmir, then via Central Asia and Russia, before finally coming into Europe.”

Archaeogenetics has given historians a new tool to re-examine the past where records are scanty. In the case of Ancient India, it is certainly clearing out the colonial historiography, save for the resistance of those whose careers have been built on outmoded European thought on India’s (and their own) ancestors. The new evidence, fodder for the Hindutva brigade, has created for itself another enemy – the anti-Hindutva brigade (because, if the Aryan invasion is not true, it could have implications regarding the dating of the IVC and the Hindu scriptures). In this tussle, it is politics that is winning out, and not our understanding of the past. For all their deploring the ban on Jaswant Singh’s book on Jinnah recently and MF Hussain’s depiction of the Hindu Goddess Saraswati in the nude, these self-appointed messiahs of Indian historiography dismiss these findings by labelling them as ‘saffronising’ Indian History (note, for example, Romila Thapar’s honorary doctorate from the Sorbonne in 2001 and the laudatio given by the French). The political instrumentalisation of theories about Indo-European origins has yielded coalitions of strange bedfellows. On the side of the hypothesis of an Aryan invasion of India, we find old colonial apologists and race theorists and their marginalized successors in the contemporary West along with a broad alliance of the Christian missionaries and the Marxists who have dominated India’s intellectual sector for the past several decades. On the side of the non-invasionist or Aryan-indigenist hypothesis, we find long-dead European Romantics and a few contemporary Western India lovers, along with an anti-colonialist school of thought in India, mainly consisting of contemporary Hindu nationalists. Obviously, among the subscribers to either view we also find scholars without any political axe to grind, and it is in these individuals we must place our hope.

This article has used the following sources:

T. Kivisild, M. J. Bamshad, K. Kaldma, M. Metspalu, E. Metspalu, M. Reidla, S. Laos, J. Parik, W. S. Watkins, M. E. Dixon, S. S. Papiha, S. S. Mastana, M. R. Mir, V. Ferak, R. Villems, “Deep common ancestry of Indian and western-Eurasian mitochondrial DNA lineages” in Current Biology, 18 November 1999, 9(22):1331-4.

T. R. Disotell, “Human evolution: The Southern Route to Asia” in Current Biology, vol. 9, No. 24, 16 December 1999, pp. R925-928(4).

Susanta Roychoudhury, Sangita Roy, Badal Dey, Madan Chakraborty, Monami Roy, Bidyut Roy, A. Ramesh, N. Prabhakaran, M. V. Usha Rani, H. Vishwanathan, Mitashree Mitra, Samir K. Sil & Partha P. Majumder, “Fundamental genomic unity of ethnic India is revealed by analysis of mitochondrial DNA,” Current Science, vol. 79, No. 9, 10 November 2000, pp. 1182-1192.

Toomas Kivisild, Surinder S. Papiha, Siiri Rootsi, Jüri Parik, Katrin Kaldma, Maere Reidla, Sirle Laos, Mait Metspalu, Gerli Pielberg, Maarja Adojaan, Ene Metspalu, Sarabjit S. Mastana, Yiming Wang, Mukaddes Golge, Halil Demirtas, Eckart Schnakenberg, Gian Franco de Stefano, Tarekegn Geberhiwot, Mireille Claustres & Richard Villems, “An Indian Ancestry: a Key for Understanding Human Diversity in Europe and Beyond”, ch. 31 of Archaeogenetics: DNA and the population prehistory of Europe, ed. Colin Renfrew & Katie Boyle (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2000), pp. 267-275.

Toomas Kivisild, Siiri Rootsi, Mait Metspalu, Ene Metspalu, Juri Parik, Katrin Kaldma, Esien Usanga, Sarabjit Mastana, Surinder S. Papiha & Richard Villems, “The Genetics of Language and Farming Spread in India,” ch. 17 in, Examining the farming/language dispersal hypothesis, eds. Peter Bellwood & Colin Renfrew (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2003), pp. 215–222.

T. Kivisild, S. Rootsi, M. Metspalu, S. Mastana, K. Kaldma, J. Parik, E. Metspalu, M. Adojaan, H.-V. Tolk, V. Stepanov, M. Gölge, E. Usanga, S. S. Papiha, C. Cinnioglu, R. King, L. Cavalli-Sforza, P. A. Underhill & R. Villems, “The Genetic Heritage of the Earliest Settlers Persists Both in Indian Tribal and Caste Populations,” American Journal of Human Genetics and the Aryan Debate / p. 13 Genetics 72(2):313-32, 2003.

Mait Metspalu, Toomas Kivisild, Ene Metspalu, Jüri Parik, Georgi Hudjashov, Katrin Kaldma, Piia Serk, Monika Karmin, Doron M Behar, M Thomas P Gilbert, Phillip Endicott, Sarabjit Mastana, Surinder S. Papiha, Karl Skorecki, Antonio Torroni & Richard Villem, “Most of the extant mtDNA boundaries in South and Southwest Asia were likely shaped during the initial settlement of Eurasia by anatomically modern humans,” BMC Genetics 2004, 5:26.

Sanghamitra Sengupta, Lev A. Zhivotovsky, Roy King, S. Q. Mehdi, Christopher A. Edmonds, Cheryl-Emiliane T. Chow, Alice A. Lin, Mitashree Mitra, Samir K. Sil, A. Ramesh, M. V. Usha Rani, Chitra M. Thakur, L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Partha P. Majumder, & Peter A. Underhill, “Polarity and Temporality of High-Resolution Y-Chromosome Distributions in India Identify Both Indigenous and Exogenous Expansions and Reveal Minor Genetic Influence of Central Asian Pastoralists,” American Journal of Human Genetics, February 2006; 78(2):202-21.

Sanghamitra Sahoo, Anamika Singh, G. Himabindu, Jheelam Banerjee, T. Sitalaximi, Sonali Gaikwad, R. Trivedi, Phillip Endicott, Toomas Kivisild, Mait Metspalu, Richard Villems, & V. K. Kashyap, “A prehistory of Indian Y chromosomes: Evaluating demic diffusion scenarios,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 24 January 2006, vol. 103, No. 4, pp. 843–848.

Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language: the Puzzle of Indo-European Origins (London: Penguin Books, 1989).

Lluís Quintana-Murci, Raphaëlle Chaix, R. Spencer Wells, Doron M. Behar, Hamid Sayar, Rosaria Scozzari, Chiara Rengo, Nadia Al-Zahery, Ornella Semino, A. Silvana Santachiara-Benerecetti, Alfredo Coppa, Qasim Ayub, Aisha Mohyuddin, Chris Tyler-Smith, S. Qasim Mehdi, Antonio Torroni, & Ken McElreavey, “Where West Meets East: The Complex mtDNA Landscape of the Southwest and Central Asian Corridor,” American Journal of Human Genetics 74(5):827-45, May 2004.

Vincent Macaulay, Catherine Hill, Alessandro Achilli, Chiara Rengo, Douglas Clarke, William Meehan, James Blackburn, Ornella Semino, Rosaria Scozzari, Fulvio Cruciani, Adi Taha, Norazila Kassim Shaari,6 Joseph Maripa Raja, Patimah Ismail, Zafarina Zainuddin, William Goodwin, David Bulbeck, Hans-Jürgen Bandelt, Stephen Oppenheimer, Antonio Torroni, Martin Richards, “Single, Rapid Coastal Settlement of Asia Revealed by Analysis of Complete Mitochondrial Genomes,” Science 13 May 2005, vol. 308, No. 5724, pp. 1034-36.

Stephen Oppenheimer, The Real Eve: Modern Man’s Journey out of Africa (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003). 

Hannah V. A. James & Michael D. Petraglia, “Modern Human Origins and the Evolution of Behavior in the Later Pleistocene Record of South Asia,” Current Anthropology vol. 46, Supplement, December 2005, pp. S3-S27.

The Idli Vendor

21 Tue Apr 2009

Posted by in Opinion and Response

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Interlocutors:

Subramanian Venkatraman
Gaius Aemilius Priscus

Setting: Brihadeeshwara Temple courtyard, Thanjavur

Subramanian: Ho there, Gaius! *beams* Fancy seeing you here today of all days. Is it not the two thousandth-something anniversary of your beloved city today?

Brihadeeshwara Temple, Thanjavur

Brihadeeshwara Temple, Thanjavur

Gaius Aemilius Priscus: Salve, Subbu! *smiles* Yes, it is the 2, 762nd anniversary of the Città Eterna…and you know us Romans, we need the benign intercession of any and all willing gods to save our city. I mean, look at us…this is the 65th government since the end of the War, the fourth prime minister in three years, who is also the third non-elected one in succession! Jupiter has clearly washed his hands off us, maybe Siva can help *laughs*

Subramanian: Yes, well…we are not ones to speak on executive effectiveness, as you can see around you.

Gaius: This one man – one vote, I say. Cannot work in a country with such great diversity of material conditions.

Subramanian: Are you talking about India or Rome?

Gaius: India, but the principle holds true anywhere.

Subramanian: Wait…let me get this straight – you don’t believe in universal adult suffrage?! Thambi, this is the 21st century!

Gaius: Fat lot of good your century has done you. You have vote banks, minoritarian pressures, caste politics…what is it they say here, you don’t cast your vote but you vote your caste? This is what happens when you give plebeians the vote. Most have no clue what they are voting for; they only know their own desires and not the cost at which even their needs might be met.

Subramanian: Oh, come on! You think the educated and refined do not have prejudices? Don’t be silly, of course they do! What’s more, they can probably disguise their biases with the clever use of some social theorist of the day or the other.

Gaius: Subbu, education is just one possible criterion. It’s like a cut-off point that we have in exams for passing a student. One could argue it’s arbitrary, but where would we be without some standard of objective discrimination? It is useful even if not perfect…think of it as a heuristic device. Besides, there’s a better argument to be made for education as a criterion. An educated person is more likely to have met people of diverse backgrounds at his school and workplace and is therefore more likely to be aware of alternative views on an issue even if he doesn’t agree with them. Prejudice aside, I am talking about voting.

Subramanian: So am I. Let us imagine that you had a some sort of educational criterion for voting. I assume you’d want this for standing for office too. What’s to stop an educated class from appropriating the state machinery to serve their interests?

Gaius: First of all, you speak like these two groups do not belong to the same society. One cannot really survive without the other – the elite cannot survive without manual labour, and if the elite have an environment in which they can function well, who will be the part-beneficiaries of those extra schools, factories, and offices? It’s the mobility that counts more than the mere existence of strata. This is a symbiotic relationship Subbu, don’t forget that. You want good workers, you want loyal workers…that means you have to take care of them too.

Subramanian: I’m sure that is what all those cotton mill workers were thinking in late 18th and 19th century England *smiles*

Gaius: We have laws now to prevent such exploitation, macha! Besides, those mill workers might have wanted to vote and represent their interests but many of their reforms were introduced by others in the elite. The Reform Acts in England were hardly introduced by plebeians in the House! In fact, the lower classes have steadily increased their rights over time despite not having political representation for most of human existence. I may be biased here with my own, but I daresay Uncle Julius did a lot more for slaves in the Empire than Spartacus ever achieved.

Subramanian: No, I am not getting you started now on the glories of Rome, Gaius! But the laws guarding against exploitation – they can easily be modified…especially if these people have no political weight.

Gaius: Yes, and there are non-political reasons to maintain a dignified amount of labour protections. There is a basic sense of human dignity which I don’t expect people of this era to understand, but there are economic reasons too. Speaking of which, walk with me, I thought I saw a lady selling idli near the entrance.

[Gaius and Subramanian get up and start ambling towards the idli vendor]

Subramanian: *grumbles* What is it with your love affair with idli?! One would think you’re the Dravidian!

Gaius: And you are a fake Dravidian for not liking idli…you prefer tea over kaapi too, infidel!

Subramanian: Anyway, voting is not merely about economics. Since we are talking about India, you have to see the context in which universal adult franchise was made a constitutional right. There were social components to it too.

Gaius: Such as?

Subramanian: Well, you mentioned caste earlier. Despite what many urbanites think, caste still plays a major role in India. Haven’t you noticed how in some houses the servants do not sit at the table but on the floor when eating? Or how some houses keep a separate set of utensils for giving food to the servants?

Gaius: But that could also include a less fortunate brahmin…we’re not exactly the moneyed caste, you know!

Subramanian: 1947, da! Yes, there may have been poor brahmins but the majority of the labourers, untouchables, or downtrodden were lower caste people. With little access to opportunity, they were the overwhelming majority of the underprivileged. Why and how this situation came to pass is a topic for another day but for the purposes of universal adult suffrage, the discrimination against these people would not have gone away if they had not been given the vote.

Gaius: [To vendor: Naalu iddliyum chutniyum konduva pattima] Subbu, that is nonsense! You think suffrage can eradicate discrimination?! Do you know how many rich and educated black people sometimes find it difficult to call a taxi in the United States? I agree money ameliorates things, but I think you are putting too much faith in suffrage. Besides, I fundamentally disagree with the implicit argument you are making that only a dalit can speak for dalit interests.

Subramanian: No, but think about it: if India approached democracy the way you seem to be suggesting, the only people who would have got the right to vote would be the educated and rich elite. I seriously doubt that there would have been any social justice agenda in the legislature.

Gaius: While I do enjoy your misanthropy Subbu, I would like to remind you that the Abolitionists were not all black men! Even here, in India, Ambedkar’s sterling role in guiding Dalit politics notwithstanding, you’ll have to agree that there was an outpouring of remorse among the Hindu upper caste elite across the political spectrum. From Namboodiripad to Savarkar. One could make a credible argument that it was the educated upper caste elite which made your Indian version of affirmative action possible.

Subramanian: No, they were not all black men, but how long did it take them to abolish slavery? How much longer to achieve the vote? And how much after that to attain even some semblance of equality?

Gaius: But two points, ma. One, reform movements do start from within; an outside impetus is not always required. As long as we are open to new ideas, we will be fine. Since we are standing in the shadow of the Brihadeeshwara Temple, consider the several reform movements within Hinduism itself. Raja Rammohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Madhavacharya…many have been entirely internal without external influence. As painful as some forms of discrimination may be, we have to remember that reform takes time and works best slowly. Society is, by default, a conservative animal…it cannot handle rapid change well. Just look at the rapid accumulation of wealth in your country…class, culture, or whatever you call it, comes after three generations of good humanistic education.

Also, look at many of the educated, elite brahmins you speak disparagingly of – Savarkar, Namboodiripad…they were all against caste discrimination. I doubt they were exactly the kind to be swayed by the Nehruvian liberal model of social justice!

Two, what do you have to show for extending the vote to all for over six decades? As you said, there is still caste discrimination so that problem has not gone anywhere. In addition, the inability of the majority of the electorate to understand larger issues has lowered the level of public discourse to topi, puppy, and the colour of the kurta! On the one hand you bemoan the lack of discussion on policy yet on the other, you dilute the intellect of the electorate?

Subramanian: It could have been – would have been – a lot worse.

Gaius: But don’t you now have discrimination within the lower castes now? If I remember correctly, the creamy layer of the lower castes are oppressing the even lower layers! How is that helping your case?

These quotas, this suffrage…they are like applying a Band-Aid to a bullet wound. Real democracy must come from within; the constitution is a document reflecting values already inherent in the people. The violence done to tradition by India’s Anglicised elite is incalculable. Not only was India not ready for democracy but the rupture with its own evolution was stupendously obtuse.

Subramanian: *frowns* People are stupid…about the intra-caste discrimination, I mean. But this Indic past…I am not sure Indians can always drag something out of their history to solve today’s problems.

Gaius: [To vendor: Nandri, iddali romba pramadam] *both walk back to their shaded corner in the temple courtyard*  It’s not about history, it’s about this blasted modernity that has ruined much. For example, look at the state – the Anglo-Saxons made it into a contractual relationship, like with an outsider, whereas the Greco-Roman ideal has always been a culturally informed state. Taoism was closely tied to state functions in China, for example, which, obviously, was slowly replaced by Buddhism from the Qing dynasty on. Similarly, Hinduism sees the state and the people as parts of the same organism. After all, what is the state if not an embodiment of the people? The moment you see it that way, this entire notion of rights changes.

Subramanian: Sure, in monarchies in Europe, China, and India…maybe elsewhere too. I don’t think those structures can hold in a democracy like ours.

Gaius: Well, don’t forget that Rome was a republic for almost five centuries before it became an empire. We had a constitutionally defined position as dictator and it worked quite well…until entropy kicked in!

Subramanian: *laughs* The eternal struggle between the classes, yes…Marx, you old plagiarer!

Gaius: How did we decide on who gets to vote back in the day? We allowed those with a stake in society – landowners, businessmen, and so on. Now these people were full citizens and they had a duty to fight in the army if necessary. In fact, service was part of the citizen’s deal – he paid taxes, fought in the army if necessary, served in civilian posts, and he got to have a say in how the society was run. That was what the cursus honorum was all about.

The lower classes had their tribunes and the upper classes their senators. Obviously, it was never so smooth, but it never is. Systems are approximate, you must realise that. Besides, the system would not work today in many of its aspects – imagine 600 million people joining military service in India, or imagine the millions willing to renounce citizenship to avoid paying taxes! The tiered system has some benefits, nonetheless.

Subramanian: So citizenship was conferred upon participation, upon contribution? So basically if I were a Numidian in the 4th century BCE, I could move to Rome, start a business, pay taxes, and vote?

Gaius: Of course not, don’t be silly! You have to be conferred citizenship, it was an honour, not a right. With this honour came new privileges and heavier burdens. These honours were not given to anyone – depending upon when during our glorious rule, only Romans were citizens, then Latins, and then Italians. It was right at the fevered end that citizenship was extended to everyone in the Empire.

Citizenship reflected the relationship between the individual and his society. Was he willing to contribute to making it a better place? Bleed for it? Sweat for it? And even then, there were always ties of blood. What role would you give your neighbour, for example, in advising you about your marital discord? He may be a friend, but he is an outsider and all decisions are yours and your wife’s.

Subramanian: But surely there is a case to be made  that anyone who resided in Rome and contributed to its well-being via investments, taxation, and law-abiding conduct was an asset to the Empire? In the modern context, what if an NRI wanted to vote?

Gaius: No, there is no case. Suffrage is not bought, it is not an open club; it is a right bestowed upon some – well, nowadays all – that are of the community. Modern India’s experimentation with multicultural citizenship has weakened this sense of identity. Nothing wrong in multiculturalism but giving minorities special privileges was not the Roman way…and no one can deny that Rome was vibrantly multicultural. But you need an anchor.

As for NRIs, they are citizens and have a vote as I understand it. At least now they do…and as much as it would please me to have absentee ballots from abroad, that is not exactly a major issue as some pretend. When you pay your phone bill or taxes, you go to the government don’t you? Similarly, if you want to vote, come to your constituency! Absentee ballots are more of a requirement for people with highly transferable jobs like the military, honestly.

Subramanian: And I am beginning to think that PIOs have no voting privileges under your system…

Gaius: It’s not my system, it’s the law! Why should foreigners vote? These people left India – and they may have had very good reasons – and acquired a foreign citizenship. What makes them think they have any rights remaining in India? Even if they come back, until they do not re-acquire Indian citizenship, I see no reason to allow them voting privileges. They left for personal profit and they’re back for personal profit…without renouncing their foreign citizenship. I suppose it could be argued that they have an option not to live with the consequences of the vote unlike other Indians and so it is not fair to allow them to vote. But I personally favour the civilisational argument.

From the perspective of a contractual state, a case may be made for them to vote if certain criteria are met but from the perspective of a civilisational state, they have left the fold. Europe has transformed from civilisational states to contractual states. Why and when takes us far afield from our topic today but the question is, for you Indians, what kind of state do you want?

Subramanian: And are we not already living in a contractual state?

Gaius: Here, I disagree and go against the common perception. There is this lovely book I was reading the other day by a chap called Chris Bayly in which he argued that we see the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution as a overpowering, unitary discourse. Which, of course, it was not. There is always a great deal of plurality in the ‘now-ness’ that is erased by meta-narratives, Subbu. Bayly says that because of this, we are surprised by the resurgence of religion in politics at the end of the Cold War when in fact it had always been there and we had not noticed.

To get to the point, no…I do not see India as a state but a nation-state. While the state may be the  contractual skeleton, the nation lends the sinews. Why should you care about India and not any other place that has similar or better contractual terms? To reduce the world to this utilitarian abstraction is nonsensical though many individualists do make this leap. But psychology shows us that we function best as communities, not individuals.

Okay, all this talking has made me thirsty…come, let’s get some kaapi from that idli vendor *stands up, stretches, and starts walking towards the temple gate again*

Subramanian: Amma, these bleddy firangs and their kaapi fetish! Well, you are right that we are straying way off course on this debate about state, contracts, and citizenship though I do see the connect with voting rights…or privileges as you may understand them. But let us get back to the narrower topic of Indians voting, particularly the disadvantaged.

You must admit Gaius, that in India, laws and reform movements have their limits. Laws can barely be implemented in cities, let alone penetrate the rural heartlands. In a situation where the untouchables would not have franchise, this could result in the continued propagation of this atrocious practice; their political mobilisation is important.

Erm…ah yes: you mentioned Namboodiripad and such, and yes, they were anti-caste discrimination. But what guarantees can there be that the entire administrative machinery will suddenly transcend their parochialism and turn reformist? You mention Hindu reformers, dear Gaius…so many reformers and yet so much untouchability?

Gaius: Haha! I could flip that around Subbu, and ask, so much political representation and yet so much untouchability? But seriously, what makes you think that political representation changes untouchability? Would education not affect that more as qualified people move to big cities in India and abroad? There is a far stronger argument – which I am sympathetic to, by the way – to be made for improving access to schools and universities. This benefits all Indians without discrimination. The real disenfranchisement, Subbu, comes from poverty. Look at the stratification within the dalits – it’s monetary, not caste based.

[To vendor: Ondu kaapi kodtheera, amma?]

Subramanian: Eh, foreigner! At least get the language right…this is the proper Dravida desam! [To vendor: Kaapi thaanga amma]

Gaius: In the words of the great Chris Tucker, “all of y’all look alike!” *laughs* Anway…this brings me to another point I wanted to make: to represent my view on adult franchise as an all or nothing system does it disservice. I’d argue that a tiered voting system is perhaps more suited. In all probability, even an illiterate farmer in Therekalputhoor or Rajakkamangalam knows more about his coconut groves than some babu in Dilli but the same farmer is unlikely to understand the nuances of India’s relations with Iran or France. In a more federal system, if the Union list and State list allowed states autonomy over their local administration – in the full sense of the word – that farmer would have a say in the policies that affect him directly but not in affairs that concern him only indirectly.

States can lobby the Centre for foreign policy initiatives – I’m sure you have a lot of thoughts on Lanka but less on, say, the Maldives. You might even have a third tier at the local level for local affairs, I don’t know…I am hardly creating a political document here, just voicing some thoughts. The educated – let’s say baccalaureate, first class, for now – can vote in national elections. I know news consumption is at an all-time low, that most allegedly educated people prefer to surf the internet for the latest skimpily clad starlet rather than reactor fuel assembly lattices, and this benchmark is problematic, but think of it as filtering out the riffraff rather than creating the perfect electorate!

Subramanian: Well, as long as you concede that the educated need not know anything, really, about the issues they might be voting on…

Gaius: Yes but the probability of them knowing more is higher than a village bumpkin…or an urban urchin.

Subramanian: And tell me, even if I agreed with you, how do you intend to implement this elaborate scheme in a country like India where they have difficulty maintaining even a regular electoral list?

Gaius: On that, I must concede defeat! But if the principles are sound, at least we can steer towards the general direction. There is no need to adopt ideas like sovereignty or franchise wholesale without any heed to applicability.

Subramanian: Then this is a good time for me to leave. While you’ve scoffed down idli and kaapi, my tummy is rumbling for its ragi! I’ll see you in the evening at the temple Echampati Gayathri concert this evening. Bye!

Gaius: Yes, I am getting dark in this blasted tropical sun too…ciao, paisan!