How philosopher KC Bhattacharyya appealed for liberation from British ‘cultural subjection’

Any discussion of Indian “culture” per se is strewn with landmines. Let me expand on these difficulties with reference to a major debate that continues to stalk discussions on culture. Some of these difficulties were pointed out by two philosophers, Dharmendra Goel and Rajendra Prasad, in their comments on “Swaraj in Ideas”, authored by the eminent philosopher Krishna Chandra Bhattacharya (1875–1949), or KCB as he is popularly known. We begin, then, with KCB’s argument.

In 1929, KCB, George V Chair at Calcutta University, delivered the Sir Ashutosh Memorial Lecture to students at Hooghly Mohsin College in Chandernagore, located at a short distance from Calcutta. The essay was found in his papers after his death and published. The publication of “Swaraj in Ideas” was well received by the philosophical community, and most tomes on Indian political philosophy include profound commentaries on his intensely reflective talk.

The lecture was delivered in the context of momentous political changes in the country: the swell of nationalism under the inspired leadership of Gandhi, the adoption in 1929 of the resolution on Purna Swaraj by the Indian National Congress, and the spiritualisation of the discourse on freedom by public intellectuals.

Krishna Chandra Bhattacharya gave the concept of freedom a new dimension by focusing specifically on intellectual liberation from another culture. The issue that he raised was this: how do ideas and ideals introduced by a dominant culture to a colonised culture affect the freedom to think, reflect and evaluate? How do we acquire swaraj in ideas in an intellectually dominated society?

The task is difficult, he admitted, because though it is easy to understand and even resist political domination, intellectual hegemony is so subtle that it escapes comprehension and sure grasp. When he spoke of cultural subjection, he did not mean the assimilation of an alien culture. That assimilation need not be an evil; it may be positively necessary for healthy progress. And in any case, it did not necessarily imply a loss of freedom. “There is cultural subjection only when one’s traditional cast of ideas and sentiments is superseded without comparison or competition by a new cast representing an alien culture which possesses one like a ghost.” This subjection led to slavery of the spirit. “When a person can shake himself free from it, he feels as though the scales have fallen from his eyes. He experiences a rebirth and that is what I call Swaraj in Ideas,” wrote KCB.

KCB was not a nativist who disdained other cultures. Nor was he naïve. A country that had been ruled by the British for more than 160 years by the time he gave his lecture could hardly escape the impact of Western systems of learning and interpretation. Indeed, this is the nature of colonialism everywhere, it leaves indelible imprints not only on the economy, society and politics, but majorly on systems of knowledge. The colonised begin to look at their own past and intellectual inheritance through cognitive resources bequeathed by the coloniser. The coloniser is ingenious; he controls the mind of the colonised through hegemony – a term popularised by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Their capacity to think reflectively or creatively or independently is consequently mediated by another culture.

As KCB suggested, it is not as if a foreign culture had been imposed upon us forcibly. We ourselves asked for this education, and this had been a blessing. The problem came from the thoughtless and unthinking acceptance and even absorption of ideas and ideals that had their source in another culture. Proceeding to elaborate on what he called the “slavery” that had entered our very soul, KCB suggests, true knowledge comes not from knowledge of ideas and ideals from another culture, but by assimilating them in an aware and open-eyed way. The Indian mind failed to do this. It had subsided below the conscious level of knowledge. Partly or incompletely assimilated ideas from the West had induced in us a “shadow mind that functions like a real mind except in the matter of genuine creativeness”.

Interestingly, GK Chesterton, in the Illustrated London News of September 18, 1909, had used the phrase shadow mind. He had written that Indian nationalism was neither Indian nor nationalist. Indians who demanded Home Rule belonged to an elite that did not represent Indian opinion. They were a small and decultured group that existed in a false shadow world. Their intellectual world was shadowed because they had been somewhat educated by British education and civilisation, yet they were still partly darkened by India’s obscure Oriental traditions.

KCB did not use the phrase shadow mind in quite the same dismissive way. The shadow mind is the unhappy product of ready and unexamined acceptance of ideas and ideals from other cultures. Resultantly, a layer of Western knowledge coexists, somewhat uneasily, with layers of our own knowledge. Our minds are a pastiche of Indian and Western ideas. This results in a lack of clarity and leads us towards confusion. If we take ideas from others without understanding whether they are relevant for us, and if we do not know how to reconcile them with our own cultural meaning systems, the process does not result in a creative mind but a mind that jostles between different sorts of ideas and ideals.

It is not the acceptance of, but the uncritical acceptance of Western ideas that troubled KCB. For the process generates neither creativity nor renewed imaginations. For KCB, the Indian mind had lapsed. “Slavery has entered into our very soul.”

One would have expected, wrote KCB, that after a century of contact with the “vivifying ideas of the West there should be a vigorous output of Indian contribution in a distinctive Indian style to the culture and thought of the modern world – contribution specially to the humane subjects like history, philosophy or literature, a contribution such as may be enjoyed by our countrymen who still happen to retain their vernacular mind and which may be recognized by others as reflecting the distinctive soul of India”.

But Indian literary figures had not been able to offer analysis or assessments of Western literature from the Indian point of view. In their writing, they tended to resemble Western critics. Therefore, we did not know whether it was our judgement forged on the anvil of Indian literature and aesthetics or “whether it is not merely the mechanical thinking of the galvanic mind induced in us through our Western education”. There was nothing to show that we had achieved a synthesis of Indian with Western thought, especially in the field of philosophy. And it was in philosophy that the task of discovering the soul of India was imperative for the modern Indian. “Genius can unveil the soul of India in art, but it is in philosophy that we can methodically attempt to discover it.”

KCB foregrounded issues that require deep thought. How can we live a life of the mind, he asked, when we are trapped in a welter of unsynthesised ideas? What troubled KCB was the consequence of this non-assimilation; the apathy of and the growing lack of vigour in Indian philosophy. The Indian mind “neither welcomes nor resists the ideas through the new education. It dares not exert itself in the cultural sphere”. Accordingly, we had failed to develop a distinctive intellectual identity. We could not tell who we were, because we lacked a grounded understanding of our own cultural and historical situation. Soulless thinking appeared to be real thinking. But it was not. The only way out was to conceptualise an Indian way of responding to new texts and abjuring the tendency to repeat what came to us from the West.

The issues articulated by KCB form an integral part of a debate that continues to trouble the mind of philosophers: how can we think clearly when the cultural context within which we think is marked by a muddled and somewhat chaotic juxtaposition of cultural meanings from abroad? Some years before KCB, Sri Aurobindo had published a series of essays in the monthly review, Arya, on the “Renaissance in India” (1918), “Indian Culture and External Influence” (1919), “Is India Civilised?” (1918–19), and a “Defence of Indian Culture” (1919). These were republished in 1920 and then in 1997. In this work, he tackled the same issue as KCB did in 1929.

When two cultures encounter each other, a certain amount of imitation, or even a great amount, is a psychological necessity of the situation. When a culture that has fallen into a state of inactivity receives the shock of a waking, active, tremendously creative civilization, when it “finds thrown upon it novel and successful powers and functionings…it is impelled by the very instinct of life to take over these ideas and forms, to annex, to enrich itself, even to imitate and reproduce, and in one way or in another take large account and advantage of these new forces and opportunities”. But if there is only a mechanical imitation, if there is a subordination and servitude, the inactive or weaker culture perishes. It is swallowed up by the invading Leviathan.

We must accept, wrote Aurobindo, that some imitation of the more powerful culture is inevitable. We cannot reject it because interaction with the environment is essential for healthy persistence and growth. The living organism that rejects all such interchange will speedily languish and die of lethargy and inaction. We had taken over in literature the form of the novel, the short story, the critical essay; methods of science; in politics, the press, the platform, the forms and habits of agitation and the public association. No one wanted to get rid of these additions, he said.

The question was: what do we do with them? Could we transform them into instruments and moulds of our own spirit? “If so, there has been acceptance and assimilation; if not, there has been merely helpless imitation.” We had to integrate them into our characteristic way of being and transform them by enabling these ideas to shape action. But “if we ‘take over’ anything, the good and the bad in it will come together pell-mell.” We had to therefore, learn to discriminate between the good and the bad.

Whatever helps me, argued Aurobindo, to find myself more intimately, nobly and with greater and sounder possibility of self-expressive creation, is good; whatever carries me out of my orientation, whatever weakens and belittles my power, richness, breadth and height of well-being, is bad for me. If I accept ideas, liberty, equality, democracy, it is not because they are European but because they are human and because they are of greatest importance to the life of man. “What I mean by assimilation, is that we must not take it crudely in the European forms, but must go back to whatever corresponds to it, illumines its sense, justifies its highest purport in our own spiritual conception of life and existence, and in that light work out its extent, degree, form, relation to other ideas, application.”

“I take it as a self-evident law,” continued Aurobindo, “of individual being applicable to group-individuality, that it is neither desirable nor possible to exclude everything that comes in to us from outside. I take it as an equally self-evident law that a living organism, which grows not by accretion, but by self-development and assimilation, must recast the things it takes in to suit the law and form and characteristic action of its biological or psychological body, reject what would be deleterious or poisonous to it – and what is that but the nonassimilable? – [and] take only what can be turned into useful stuff of self-expression.”

The answer to the question of how we should assimilate a more powerful European culture was that we must evaluate and absorb what was relevant to us.

In effect, for Aurobindo, what we receive from another culture comes as a mixed inheritance, in which the good and the bad are inextricably intertwined. What we can do, however, is to judge what is genuinely good for human beings, and to reject every idea that is poisonous. Aurobindo suggested, in sum, that we should evaluate whether the ideas we accept are relevant for our times, our needs, and our aspirations. He therefore gives the receiving and the less powerful culture the capacity to choose between ideas that flow like a torrent from the West. The implication is that we can liberate ourselves from the tyranny of all received ideas and ideals when we can figure out which ideas enrich our mind and which constrain it. This is how freedom of the intellect can be secured.

Excerpted with permission from Languages of Freedom: The Idea of India in Political Theory, Bombay Cinema and Progressive Urdu Poetry, Neera Chandhoke, Speaking Tiger Books.