At home and in the world

Intellectual history in India is in as much torpor as the rest of the field. If it is not related to social concepts and classes, it is anathema. The examination of the thinking of significant individuals in recent Indian history, linking them, and showing their influence and impact on our society, is almost deemed to be the work of the devil.

It is, therefore, a matter of relief that this stranglehold of the pedantic and boring has been broken, with Iranian-Canadian academic Ramin Jahanbegloo’s superb take on India as dialogical civilisation. The title of this book will raise hackles, as it explicitly invokes Hegel, not exactly the darling of academia (earlier or today), given his almost religious incantation to the zeitgeist, the world spirit.

Jahanbegloo, fresh from a stint in Iranian prisons for daring to work in India, is not interested in the impact that the people he writes about had on the nationalist movement’s thinking; he is focused on how they saw India and its links with the world at large, with the question of whether there can be any meeting of East and West, without one losing itself in the other. This difference means that Jahanbegloo looks at people we expect to read about (Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore), some we do not really expect (Maulana Azad, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan), and the totally unexpected (Vinoba, Sri Aurobindo, A.K. Coomarswamy) in a new and refreshing light. If there is any caveat about this book, it’s because there are no references to allow us to explore the writings of his protagonists more fully, and the occasional error—Jayprakash Narayan was never a minister.

In Gandhi’s case, Jahanbegloo notes him as “one of the significant intellectual figures who possess the disturbing capacity to unsettle our fixed categories, to shake our inherited conceptual habit, and to let use the world in new light.”  Both Gandhi and Nehru he sees as constantly striving to accommodate diversities. Jahanbegloo comments that Nehru had more in common with Tagore than he had with Gandhi, a fact Nehru always acknowledged. If Vinoba strove to keep Gandhi’s ideals alive, then Azad and Ghaffar Khan tried to realise similar principles within the ambit of Islam.

Jahanbegloo’s main achievement has been to resurrect the reputations of Radhakrishnan, Aurobindo and Coomarswamy. All three were during their day held in deep respect and wielded influence through the power of pen and thought. It was the inability on the part of lesser intellects to come to terms with or comprehend this power that led them to being unjustly neglected and marginalised over the years. For it is these three, who more than anyone else, laid the intellectual foundations for what we call a dialogue among civilisations, and that elusive unity of humankind.

Between them, they laid the ground on which unity in diversity, that chestnut about Indian history by the historian Vincent Smith, can be achieved on a global scale. All three stressed the role of culture, with Radhakrishnan focusing on religious convergence, Aurobindo on political unity, and Coomarswamy the ethical principles that animate life. All of them aimed at being at home and in the world, without any friction between the two.