For a long time, the narrative of modernity was told as a story of travel. Modernity<\/a>, it was said, was born in the West and then journeyed outwards, adapting along the way to the economic, political, and social contexts of the lands into which it was transplanted. Reshaped by local conditions, it yielded different results in different places. This gave rise to \u201cmultiple modernities\u201d.<\/p>\n This account contains a grain of truth, but just a grain. The idea of the multiple modernities it generates is thin. In the last instance, it remains a version of Western modernity, an integral part of what should really be called \u201cmultiple Western modernities\u201d. However, there is something deeper at play in the making of modernity in India<\/a>.<\/p>\n To grasp what that is, we must first jettison the notion that modernity is a set of culture-neutral operations (the growth of science and technology, industry, markets, the bureaucracy, and the nation state) that any society undergoes once it crosses a certain threshold, as if modernity were an ideas-free institutional package that could be delivered anywhere.<\/p>\n A more plausible view holds that institutions and practices cannot be understood without reference to the meanings and values that animate them. Modernity is not just a set of culture-free arrangements; it is also a way of understanding the self, society, and the good.<\/p>\n Once we accept this, and accept too that such self-understandings vary with time and place, a different, deeper idea of multiple modernities follows ineluctably. Because India has its own long history of collective self-understandings, and because modernity is bound up with notions of self and the good life, modernity in India must also have been generated from within.<\/p>\n My intuition that this is so received a powerful push when I encountered the literature on the Axial Age, an unusual period that marked a turning point in human thought and self-understanding.<\/p>\n Scholars have observed that in the first millennium BCE, a series of intellectual revolutions took place, largely independently, in India, Greece, China, Persia, and Palestine (extendable when supported by research to other regional cultures) that changed the axis of thought. These were moments when things changed rapidly and radically. They produced new forms of self-reflection, new \u201cabstract\u201d vantage points from which to examine the world and the self, new visions of the good life, new aspirations to overcome the limits imposed by existing conditions, and new strategies for closing the gap between what is and what ought to be.<\/p>\n I propose that these axial moments prefigured what we later came to call modernity and laid the foundations for different modernities. The ideas they generated became deeply rooted in the histories and traditions of the places where they emerged. These axial moments do not dispute that modernity has a European version; they deny that it has an exclusively European inheritance.<\/p>\n Until the clear formulation of the idea of deeper multiple modernities, many ideas and practices that took shape in India after the 18th century and had some resemblance to European reality were subsumed within Western frameworks, given Western names, and acquired a misleading Western appearance, even though they were formed more by pre-existing local traditions.<\/p>\n Admittedly, two streams often coexisted: the relatively recent import from Europe and a long, continuously evolving social and moral imaginary that crystallised well before the birth of Western modernity. But in many instances, the Indian inheritance is more solid than the Western import. For example, a robust sense of the individual self may have been bolstered by Western individualist ideas but has a local lineage going back 2,500 years.<\/p>\n Why did we frequently fail to properly recognise this? One affliction of formerly colonised societies is a lack of confidence in their own originality. That diffidence is now being challenged, but not nearly enough. Contrast this with modern Europe, the youngest of the civilisations shaped by the Axial Age, which not only recognised its own transformation but made a great deal of it. This was partly because Europeans came to believe in ruptures, an idea drawn from their own reading of the Abrahamic tradition, which saw radical discontinuity where others saw a mixture of continuity and change.<\/p>\n In the European story, Western modernity has at least two sources: one born in Palestine, which they called \u201creligion\u201d, and the other in Greece and Rome, which they called \u201csecular\u201d. But in this story, modernity was impossible without ruptures. The Christian past broke from an earlier Greco-Roman past; early modern Europe, in turn, sought to break from its Christian past.<\/p>\n By virtue of its imperial power, Europe controlled the narrative of modernity and exported this notion everywhere, telling others that since they had not broken with their past, they were not modern but merely traditional.<\/p>\n Tradition and modernity came to be seen as adversaries, with modernity always in a positive light and tradition always in a negative one. I do not wish here to question the validity of this story for Europe, but for societies such as India, it is oversimple, if not altogether false. To be sure, non-Western societies did seek to break free from aspects of their own past. But it is a serious misunderstanding to believe, as many early theorists of non-Western cultures did, that non-Western peoples needed to break away completely from their own traditions in order to become modern.<\/p>\n They sought to break with part of their past while drawing on other parts of it to make their present. There was much in their past, in their own tradition, that was modern in the sense the West understands the term \u201cmodern\u201d. So, even when they did not quite see this properly, Indians were leaning on their traditions in order to build a new modern, if I may use the phrase.<\/p>\n Take three instances. Ancient India had a flourishing tradition of reasoning, containing both \u0101nv\u012bksik\u012b,<\/i> the discipline of critical inquiry, and dar\u015bana,<\/i> systematic philosophical vision. A reason-based discourse of critique and questioning has not come to us via the European Enlightenment. Likewise, while India has had a deeply entrenched caste order, at least since the beginning of the first century BCE, social practices that rejected hierarchies, challenged fixed social locations, and discarded received identities existed from early on, starting with Vedic ascetics, Buddhists, and Jainas, and these point to a robust individualism.<\/p>\n \n Muslim women dressing up their children as Lord Krishna to take part in a school function ahead of the Janmashtami festival, in Nagpur, in 2016. Finally, secularism. Its Indian story begins not in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the word and some understanding of it arrived, but in the 3rd century BCE, with Ashoka and his response to religious diversity and difference. That early moment shaped the form and structure that secularism would later take in India.<\/p>\n Our modernity, in short, is ours because, well before Western modernity, we had some traditions akin to modernity, though not identical with it. That we lack a term for this does not mean it did not exist (although, arguably, in some contexts the term \u0101dhunik<\/i> did that work). It reveals only a failure of imagination and the lingering grip of a colonial habit of mind that keeps us from seeing what should have been obvious.<\/p>\n I have so far written as if modernity, Western or Indian, is an unambiguous good for humanity. It is not. Environmental destruction, genocides, large-scale wars, alienation, anomie, unfettered individualism, and the idea of religions as rival ideological communities are among the negative aspects of modernity, its malaise.<\/p>\n Yet, it is undeniable that there are substantial gains too. Let me add three more to those mentioned above. First, the aspiration that all, and not merely a few, should enjoy a decent material life. Second, a willingness to take the word \u201call\u201d seriously so that it includes all hitherto marginalised groups, women in particular.<\/p>\n And, third, the conviction that everyone should have at least some say in decisions about their own affairs: a democratic aspiration. These are genuine achievements for the ethical life of communities.<\/p>\n Have any of these ideas and practices existed fully formed in our past? No. Have they, therefore, come to us from the West, with colonisation? At one time, I would have said yes, but now I am inclined to say no. While it must be acknowledged that these ideas and their institutional expressions took full form only recently, the elements from which they have been composed have an Indian past. Modernity in India is more Indian than Western.<\/p>\n Rajeev Bhargava, a political theorist, is honorary professor at CSDS, Delhi, and director of the centre\u2019s Parekh Institute of Indian Thought.<\/i><\/p>\n Also Read | Eternal India<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Also Read | India as inspiration for the continent<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\nThe Axial Age<\/h3>\n
Colonial legacy<\/h3>\n
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