A widely cited feature of cultural majoritarianism in many parts of the world is its precarious ties with ‘truth.’ We are apparently living in a ‘post-truth’ world with the wisdom of the Enlightenment under threat, according to a fashionable critique of populism. What is truth? In a well-researched and lucidly written book, The Truth about Us, Sanjoy Chakravorty argues that the notion of ‘truth’ itself is shaky in this age of information as many facts that we worship are social and administrative constructs forced on us.
Drawing from disciplines as wide-ranging as social psychology, sociology, history, communication and economics, the author tells us how categories of religion and caste were alien to people who lived in India before the arrival of colonialism. It is not that social stratification, hierarchy and even exploitation of one group by another did not exist before colonialism, the writer admits, but this point should have been made more emphatically. Some readers may mistakenly feel that the author believes pre-British India was a paradise, but that is a minor concern in a book that is otherwise a valuable contribution to understanding our fractious present.
The colonists were in a hurry to make sense of an alien population that was diverse, dispersed and fragmented by cultures and tongues. They projected their own ideas on Indian society and relied on ancient texts that were easily accessible and available to them. Manusmriti made that cut, and unwittingly became the basis for British understanding of India.
The four-tier varna system outlined in the text was not comprehensible on the ground — it was only a Brahmin fantasy, according to the author. But colonial administrators tried to shoehorn all that they saw within categories they could deal with. The introduction of census that not merely categorised people on the basis of religion and caste, but also arranged them in hierarchy, laid the foundation for identity politics in India. The entire exercise was primarily built on “knowledge of dead languages and ancient scripts.” Shuffling, aggregating and realigning these categories became politics in India, which continues till date.
The advent of print and now the revolutionary transition to digital communication accelerated the attempts to simplify, categorise and label social groups. The Hindu identity that present day Hindutva nationalists privilege over all other diversities is ironically a label stuck on a people by colonists. A different classification of the population and society would have created a different outcome. The ‘truths’ on which we claim to build our self perception and prejudices, hence, are accidents that resulted due to the convenience, mischief and ignorance of colonists.
Simplification and binary classification, amplified by information technology, did enable Hindutva. But the writer believes that the widening and deepening of information will ultimately help people process their identities better, and question the so-called truths that have held them prisoners for long. Now, that is hope.
The Truth About Us: The Politics of Information from Manu to Modi ; Sanjoy Chakravorty, Hachette India, ₹499.
