#ThrowbackThursday: Nissim Ezekiel — The Cultural Vacuum in India (1982)

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Nissim Ezekiel (1924–2004)[/caption]

The following piece was published in the July 1982 issue of Freedom First. The author of the piece, Nissim Ezekiel (1924–2004), was a noted poet, critic and editor, and also served as the editor of Freedom First.

Commenting on the fact that India has the highest road accident rate in the world, a local newspaper wrote recently, “There is simply no culture of proper driving in our big cities.”

It is the same in our small cities and towns, along the highways and even in rural areas. There are reports every day of buses and trucks overturning or falling off into ditches or crashing against a single vehicle moving in the opposite direction on a road otherwise deserted.

Use of the word culture in the quoted comment is a reminder of a truth generally overlooked in India. It is associated with religion, literature and the arts, not with mundane matters such as overtaking only on the proper side or walking on the pavements, or not spitting in public.

In all those matters and in a million others, it is a question of culture.

Analyses of Indian political issues have necessarily to be offered first of all in political terms. But their cultural sources as well as implications are also relevant. One may go further. Political points of view without cultural associations are futile.

What, then, needs most urgently and emphatically to be said about the present discouraging state of Indian political life? It is that the formal functioning of the democratic machinery lacks the spirit of a democratic culture.

No utopian ideal is being demanded here, only a minimum set of inter-related values, practised with some care and commitment. What we find in their place is a base of communalism, within which is a mix of feudal attitudes, regressive social practices and ritualistic conduct. The modern super-structure is naturally very shaky, and crumbles whenever the base is challenged, as it often is, by contemporary needs.

For example, candidates for elections representing even national parties cannot be chosen without reference to their religious and ethnic roots. These must be the same as the constituency’s.

At the next stage, after the elections, the successful representatives of the people take little or no interest in the problems of the people. They are concerned almost exclusively with the advancement of their own interests. Whatever their politics may be, which is a different matter, their culture is more or less the same. It has little room of independent thinking, a sense of service, organisational competence and initiative.

The result: failures in implementation as they are complacently called. From the work of small committees in sports clubs to policy-making institutions for the nation, the same kind of ineffectiveness and sometimes breakdown is observable. This is surely because our culture does not teach us how to cope with modern problems in today’s world. It specialises, so to speak, in a difterent brand of wisdom.

In our education, to put that notion in one specific context, the Guru-Shishya model is no longer operative, while the teacher-student one is a mere formality. Efiorts to revive the old system are exercises in futility. Similarly, efforts to put life into the new relationship, which is indispensable, seldom succeed. That is why, from primary schools to post-graduate university departments we have the externals without the creativity of true knowledge.

Some years ago an Indian journal of notable intellectuality brought out a special issue on the theme of “Waste”. All the contributors were agreed on one point, whatever their main area of concern: as a people we have not the same attitude to public property and resources as we have to our own. In other words, our culture is private and personal.

We need to extend our traditional culture into the domain of public life. and I don’t mean Westernisation. I mean an organic growth, a new flowering without loss of identity and roots.

To access the original piece, click here. Visit indianliberals.in for more works by Indian Liberals dating back to the 19th Century