Rulers and information

The book also engages with the term Hindu, a favourite theme of the RSS and its ideologues and friends, again going back to Savarkar

How does one square the reality that we live in an era in which there is almost an excess of information but a scarcity of good data?
 
India has no accurate means of measuring its levels of unemployment or its gross domestic product, and this is according to the government. There is almost no good data on inequality or wealth in India either. Are we doing well or poorly as a nation? We do not have answers or agreement on such basic questions.
 
And then, how does one deal with the idea that history can be rewritten in such violent terms that what for generations had been posited for all Indians as a blow against humanity — Godse’s assassination of Gandhi —can today be projected in electoral politics as a victory of the Hindu nation?

 

In the absence of data and the willingness to gather and engage with it (as is manifest in even the India of 2019), author Sanjoy Chakravorty’s argument in The Truth About Us: The Politics of Information from Manu to Modi is that in India, it is the rulers and their manipulation of information that has produced our truths. Information is key to knowledge. What is information? Who decides what it is? How it is organised and categorised? These are the important issues. Truths and identities are created from the manipulation of these. Where there isn’t enough information, a reality can be created.

 
For example, very little data or information on India existed before the British. Nirad Chaudhuri in his book Hinduism has also referred to this. The Raj began structuring the identity of India and Indians by interpreting what they encountered.
 
In the author’s opinion, “India” the nation did not exist before the British. There were communities but these were distinct and they did not amount to a nation. In some ways, then, this book and this sort of thinking is a response to V D Savarkar’s book written about 100 years ago, Hindutva. There are, however, things in this book that Savarkar and other Hindutvawallahs will approve.

 
For example, Mr Chakravorty examines the history of caste and asks whether it existed in the form that we know before the British Raj and particularly the census series, which began in the last quarter of 19th century. He does not, of course, deny the reality of social stratification through jati. He does not deny discrimination either. But he does ask whether it existed in the Smritic form that we now take for granted before the British. Was it the product of amateur Indologists engaging with material they translated and took as gospel? The texts were, the author tells, all in Sanskrit and the interlocutors all Brahmin. The texts were relevant mostly or only for them. Even within Brahmins, in fact, most were only aware of ritual and not text.

 
On the other hand, the presence in Indian history of many non-Kshatriya warrior-rulers (like Hakka and Bukka in Vijayanagar) seems to indicate that this rigidity of  varna may be more recent. Even the Buddha in one of his discourses gets a Brahmin to accept that he is lower in caste than the Buddha, who is, of course, Kshatriya, something that Manu would have disapproved of. Mr Chakravorty goes to the non-Sanskrit texts of India, and the travelogues written by foreigners going back to Hieun Tsang and finds that there is almost no reference to caste. He concludes that chaturvarna did not exist in India, and this is actually true. Even in our time, Kshatriya and Vaishya identity are quite problematic and contested and while there is a positive Dalit identity, no peasant community accepts it is Shudra.

 
The book also engages with the term Hindu, a favourite theme of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its ideologues and friends, again going back to Savarkar. It is a modern term that has acquired political and even militaristic dimensions. Hinduism was not a recognised category internally but a definition that came from the outside. So then how could the word “conversion” be applied to an act when there was no formal religion that one was converting out of?
 
The book also looks at the crisis of the present, and that is Hindu nationalism. British intervention ensured that any nationalism generated in the middle class was for a century directed at the outsider. The internal aspects, meaning that of the problems of Hindu society, were to some extent taken up by Ambedkar. Today we live in an era in which the internal is not addressed for the most part. And the external enemy has been replaced by the Muslim. The rise of Hindutva in our time is a redirection of nationalism.

 
The politics of information has seen an enormous change in the last two decades, between the election in which Atal Bihari Vajpayee won in 1998 and the one that Narendra Modi won in 2019. It is no longer possible to have a single truth or narrative even about so basic and obvious a thing as the economy or employment. Confirmation bias is easy and comforting given the abundance of material.
 
With an overwhelming amount and sources of information, there is according to the author actually a demand for simple stories that interpret this maze. The word chowkidar captures this spirit. This is a fine book for our times and must be read for those who have been in a daze for the past five years.

  The Truth About Us: The Politics of Information from Manu to Modi
Sanjoy Chakravorty
Hachette, 302 pages, Rs 499